i. Living, as we do, in post-Tlön times, it is easy to forget that some held out against the deluge. Jorge Luis Borges dug down deeply into his translation of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial with no intention of publishing, as though to print, to reproduce and share, would spell the end for his quiet resistance. If there is a utopia in this story, it is a private one, contained in this act like water in a vessel.
CIRCLE 2: Ideas around utopia have been prevalent in much of my research of late. This is a large part of the reason Borges’s story appealed so. Although the world imagined within it makes no claims towards the utopian, it is still an act of new world making and as such mirrors the desires and actions of those seeking utopia. Therefore (inevitably) it became inextricably linked to the threads, paths and tangents of research I had been pursuing; lines of enquiry that reveal patterns, coincidences and maps.
