Ink on paper. September 2011
In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Borges, we find the description of a hrönir.
In the most ancient regions of Tlön, the duplication of lost objects is not infrequent.
Two persons look for a pencil;the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but closer to its expectations.
These secondary objects are called hrönir and are, though awkward in form, somewhat longer.
…
The methodical fabrication of hrönir (says the Eleventh Volume) has performed prodigious services for archaeologists.
It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past, which is now no less plastic and docile than the future.
Curiously, the hrönir of second and third degree –the hrönir derived from another hrön — exaggerated the aberrations of the initial one;
those of fifth degree are almost uniform; those of ninth degree become confused with those of the second;
in those of the eleventh there is a purity of line not found in the original. The process is cyclical: the hrön of twelfth degree begins to fall off in quality.
Stranger and more pure than any hrön is, at times, the ur: the object produced through suggestion, educed by hope.
Things become duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten.
A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death.
At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.
Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges
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