On Exactitude in Science

... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single

Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a

Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers

Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided

point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the

Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless,

and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of

Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that

Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the

Disciplines of Geography.

Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658

Jorge Luis Borges, 1946