Julie Morvitz

Today’s class was based on Borges’ short story Tlon, Uqbar, Urbis Tertius. It began with Mike’s presentation, which first explained the plot. In the story, Borges finds in an encyclopedia three lands with an alternate reality. He finds the land of Tlon, which is an idealistic society with different abstract concepts. There are many schools of philosophy mentioned in the story as well. One is that we are all just a memory, and another is that we are two people- one when we are awake and one when we are asleep. There is also a loss of identity in Tlon, through the coin example. In this land, what happens to one person happens to everyone.
Mike also explains that the ideal society makes sense to be written about at this time, because there were totalitarian governments and it was easy to have an idea of what one would want in an ideal society. People also seemed to lose their identity in real life, so Borges’ story was reflecting people’s worries at that time in history.
Diviani then spoke about people’s ideas of an ideal society. With an example like communism, it sounds good in theory, but people turn into monsters when it is put into action. We watched a video about a parallel universe which asked the question, what would someone like Isaac Newton be like if he lived in an alternate universe?
After the presentation, Diviani spoke about Borges. The world was recovering from fascism when he wrote, and world events influenced his writing. In all of Borges’ stories, he talks about some kind of alternate reality. Diviani said that everyone instinctually wants immortality, and since that isn’t possible, they do things to live in people’s memories. This is the reason why writers write or why architects build buildings.
Diviani also spoke about unified consciousness, which is the idea that everything is in harmony and all people are connected and are one organism. She also spoke about deliberative democracy, which is a democracy where political actions are decided by consent, or the majority rules. This is difficult to carry out because people have a hard time setting aside their own wants to make decisions for the greater good.
In fantasy books, authors make up their own names of objects because they don’t actually exist. Diviani mentions that people take the names of things for granted, but someone had to come up with the name, and that person has power. It was also said that in books, seasons mark the passage of time. This relates to a part in Borges’ story, which said that all events are linked to each other. In other words, we can’t describe something if we can’t relate it to something else. Class concluded with a discussion of people continuously wanting homogeneity in the world, but this isn’t a good idea because we would never evolve if we were all the same.