5 Quotes Tagged: enigma
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In 1512, in handwritten notes on an enigmatic map that he had prepared showing the newly discovered Americas, the Turkish Admiral Piri Reis offered an intriguing answer to all these questions — at any rate for the particular case of Christopher Colombus, the most recent and most renowned of the ancient Atlantic dreamers. Piri's note, one of many on the same map, is written over the interior of Brazil:
'Apparently a Genoese infidel, by the name of Columbus was the one who discovered these parts. This is how it happened: a book came into the hands of this Colombus from which he found out that the Western Sea [i.e. the Atlantic] has an end, in other words that there is a coast and islands on its western side with many kinds of ores and gems. Having read this book through, he recounted all these things to the Genoese elders and said, 'Come, give me two ships, and I shall go and find these places.' They said, 'Foolish man, is there an end to the Western Sea? It is filled with the mists of darkness.
Their message will never be decoded, not only because there is no key to it, but also because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of painting and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.