Technology: Poetic History

An unending stream of gold and silver, I thought, must have flowed into this court perpetually to keep the stones coming and the masons working; to level, to ditch, to dig and to drain. But it was then the age of faith, and money was poured liberally to set these stones on a deep foundation, and when the stones were raised, still more money was poured in from the coffers of kings and queens and great nobles to ensure that hymns should be sung here and scholars taught. Lands were granted; tithes were paid. And when the age of faith was over and the age of reason had come, still the same flow of gold and silver went on; fellowships were founded; lectureships endowed...

"'The House of Asterión,'" in which a man raves insanely that he cannot escape his house of doorless corridors...only to then reveal himself as the entirely sane Minotaur of Daedalus's labyrinth. 'Pierre Menard, author of Quixote,' in which a scholar immerses himself so thoroughly in Don Quixote that he becomes its author, rewriting it word for word. 'The Bibliotheca of Babel,' in which we enter a library filled with books that contain every possible arrangement of typewriter keystrokes, producing endless rooms of gibberish, but also the tantalizing prospect of a tome that reveals all the secrets of God'" (Fletcher 307).

"Many years later, Colonel Aureliano Buendía crossed the region again, when it was already a regular mail route, and the only part of the ship he found was its burned-out frame in the midst of a field of poppies. Only then, convinced that the story had not been the product of his father's imagination, did he wonder how the galleon had been able to get inland to that spot" (308).