The Borges and Casares Dinner

About four or five years before writing Section I of TUOT, Borges has dinner with Bioy Casares in a furnished villa on Gaona Street. There is a long corridor in this villa, on one end of which hangs a mirror. Borges and Casares sit at the other end of the corridor, lingering into the late evening in debate and discussion.

The mirror spies on them and unsettles them - especially Borges.

They discuss the possibility of writing a novel in the first person, in which the narrator filters out his readers by: The aim of this novel would be to allow a few readers - and only a select few - to experience a conclusion that is both banal and horrifying.
 * leaving out significant parts.
 * distorting significant events.
 * indulging in contradictions.

The mirror continues to unsettle them.

Borges and Casares agree that there is something monstrous about mirrors. Casares remembers a saying attributed to a heresiarch of Uqbar: that "mirrors and copulation are abominable because they multiply the number of mankind." When pressed about the source of this quotation, Casares says that he had come across it in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia.

The villa in Gaona Street has a copy of this cyclopaedia, but it contains no reference to Uqbar (or any of its variant spellings). Casares claims that Uqbar was a region of Iraq or Asia Minor, but Borges is unconvinced. He scans through one of the atlases of Justus Perthes, and he finds no such allusion. He thinks that Casares has invented the region - and its heresiarch - out of modesty, in order to justify a rather catchy epigram.