A point in space no larger than a coin contains every other point in the universe, every grain of sand and every sunset and every face that has ever wept, all simultaneously visible without overlap or confusion. Jorge Luis Borges set this 1945 story in the basement of a house in Buenos Aires, where a mediocre poet guards a cosmic secret he does not deserve. The narrator descends the cellar stairs and beholds totality, and the passage that follows is one of the most astonishing catalogues in all of literature, a breathless enumeration that defeats language by using it at full velocity. Borges understood that infinity is not vague but precise, and that the mind's truest vertigo comes not from darkness but from seeing everything at once.