Horror QQ #2 - Copulation and mirrors

Music: Where is Your Boy Tonight by Fall Out Boy

For my second February QQ, I'm quoting parts of one of my favorite passages from Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths. I first encountered Borges in my literary elective Latin American Literature, way back in college. I remember getting goosebumps while reading the text, and I especially loved the running themes of labyrinths, mirrors, unending libraries, circular ruins, and photographs capturing a moment in time for all eternity.

This excerpt is from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," a "speculative fiction" short story with a bit of a detective fiction feel to it. The story begins and ends with issues of reflection, replication, and reproduction—both perfect and imperfect—and the related issue of the power of language and ideas to make or remake the world. (Yes, I got that last part from Wikipedia.)

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejía; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers—very few readers—to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors have something monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men. I asked him the origin of this memorable observation and he answered that it was reproduced in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, in its article on Uqbar.

[...]

The following day, Bioy called me from Buenos Aires. He told me he had before him the article on Uqbar, in Volume XLVI of the encyclopedia. The heresiarch's name was not forthcoming, but there was a note on his doctrine, formulated in words almost identical to those he had repeated, though perhaps literarily inferior. He had recalled:

Copulation and mirrors are abominable.

The text of the encyclopedia said:

For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.

- "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges

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Horror QQ #3 - Footprints of a gigantic hound

Horror QQ #1 - Do you believe in evil?