One paragraph, printed in a Buenos Aires literary review in 1946 and collected fourteen years later. About a hundred words. It carries a complete citation.

The citation reads: Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, book four, chapter forty-five, Lérida, 1658. The chapter has never been consulted. The book has never been located. There is no record of Suárez Miranda.

It ran inside a piece called “Museo”, under the byline B. Lynch Davis, which is two men — Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares — and is neither of them. The invented source is signed by an invented author, one layer further out, and the March issue disclosed neither.

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.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Del rigor en la ciencia”, 1946

Quotation stops there. The paragraph does not. The generations after have no use for the map and abandon it to the sun and the winters, and in the deserts of the west there are tattered ruins of it still, with animals and beggars living underneath.

Borges wrote it against rigour. Thirty-five years later another man set it at the front of his own book and ran it backwards: the map does not rot, he said, the territory does. That is not what the paragraph says. It is what the paragraph is now for.

The source does not exist. The paragraph is quoted constantly, by people who have checked.