Ellie

“This society eliminates geographical distance only to produce a new internal separation.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“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

“There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.”
― Julio Cortázar, Blow-Up and Other Stories

“I stayed with him for three days, and he then asked: ‘Do you know any craft by which to make your living?’ I told him: ‘I am a lawyer, a scientist, a scribe, a mathematician and a calligrapher.’ ‘There is no market for that kind of thing here,’ he replied. ‘No one in this city has any knowledge of science or of writing and their only concern is making money.’ ‘By God,’ I said, ‘I know nothing apart from what I have told you.”
― Anonymous