On the occasion of the launch of Google Maps Street View, the latest step in that firm’s endeavours to pixallate the known world, this blog offers a one-paragraph story by Jorge Luis Borges (with Adolfo Bioy Casares), “Of Exactitude in Science.” In a feint characteristic of Borges, this jewel of an idea is smuggled into the reader’s consciousness disguised as a fragment from a fictional chronicle:
Of Exactitude in Science
…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.
From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J. A. Suarez Miranda
[Translated by Norman Thomas de Giovanni]