| Description |
In one of his lesser-known stories, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Lewis Carroll describes the puzzlement felt by certain cartographers; who, when they compared their map of a particular region with the region itself, realized that there were many things in the region that were not in their map. Resolving to improve upon their original, they undertook to draw up a new and more descriptive map, in which they would include many more of the things in the region. But upon completing their improved map, they were disappointed to find that it was similarly - if less - flawed, for it too omitted many of the features of the region it was supposed to depict. So the cartographers then undertook to compose a third map (which they also later rejected as incomplete), and a fourth (similarly rejected), and so on, before eventually concluding that the only really adequate map of a region must be that region's perfect replica, its indiscernible counterpart -- or else just the region itself. Consequently, they completed an exact and full- scale duplicate of the region in question, thereupon found themselves unable to "spread it out," and so began, as the Professor(!) in the story explains, simply to "use the country itself, as its own map." |
