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borges_1946_exactitude.md

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+---
+title: On Exactitude in Science
+tags:
+  - exclude-from-word-count
+  - type/media
+creator:
+  - type: author
+    text: Jorge Luis Borges
+  - type: translator
+    text: Andrew Hurley
+year: 1946
+---
+# On Exactitude in Science
+
+...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.
+The following Generations,
+who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been,
+saw that that vast Map was Useless,
+and not without some Pitilessness was it,
+that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.
+In the Deserts of the West, still today,
+there are Tattered Ruins of that Map,
+inhabited by Animals and Beggars;
+in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
+
+---Suarez Miranda,
+_Viajes de varones prudentes_, Libro IV, Cap. XLV,
+Lérida, 1658