In my last post, I casually mentioned that when I first read The Age of Wire and String, I wasn’t very familiar with the precursors that had ‘made it possible’ as a book. Of course, I’m not sure exactly what earlier books helped Marcus write it, nor do I really know what it means to really ‘make a book possible.’ Instead, I think I meant that I hadn’t yet read writing that gave me a way of better appreciating The Age of Wire and String. My first reading of that book was really exciting, but difficult; I felt lost quite a lot through that book the first time. I felt that the book was isolated–and isolated me–when I first read it, but now that I’ve read some other stories and books, I think I feel comfortable putting it in a group of others that I feel do similar things to me as I read.

“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is one of those stories that, for me, connects to The Age of Wire and String in a meaningful way. As I’ve mentioned before in some of these other posts, I had previously thought of stories as ABC tales of one character or another’s plights, such as “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “To Build a Fire,” “The Most Dangerous Game,” etc., this next stage in my reading began to tune me into how words might be used for other purposes: world-building, for example.

This story reminds me of all of the time I spent as a child sketching maps of islands and other countries that I had made up. I drew in mountain ranges, detailed rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water. I created forms of government, basic economies, foreign policies, and so on. I drew pictures of the flora and fauna that inhabited these lands. These activities weren’t so much about telling a narrative story directly, but instead they seemed to be about creating and organizing a separate world in which an infinite number of stories were possible.

In some cases, it is a relief simply to create the world, rather than to write the story, for what I’m agonizing over now is that every sentence I write might kill off other possibilities within the story.