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Patreon backer Sam brings you this special episode all about Jorge Luis Borges' peryton!

Thanks to Ray Otus for our thumbnail image. The intro music is a clip from "Solve the Damn Mystery" by Jesse Spillane, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License.            

Comments

Anonymous

I like how Borges says, in the preface to the 1957 edition, that if we just combine different animal parts they would be a stillborn. He says that the creatures he put in the book provoke the imagination and have stood the test of time, but he can't help but combine a few animal parts and sneak in his own original creation. I find it interesting how he sort of covers his tracks by creating a cover story to explain why Perytons are so little known. The whole, there was a prophecy recorded and placed in Alexandria but it burned down, but a rabbi had a treatise he copied from an unknown Greek scholar from which we know about these creatures, but the original treatise was destroyed in either the bombardment of Dresden or Nazi book burnings, adds a sense of conspiracy to the Peryton. It is almost like knowledge of the Peryton is being targetted for destruction so that when the Perytons rise again humanity will be caught unawares and perhaps our own current world powers will be destroyed like Rome and perhaps Atlantis was. It does remind me of a Lovecraftian story in that evidence of the past is fading away and an alien species looms in the shadows with intent to destroy humanity.

Anonymous

...or is that PERYTON backer Sam? 🤯

monsterman

It also adds the sense of the ephemeral to the peryton. Records of this creature keep being lost, but if you consider human knowledge over very long periods, that isn't all that unusual. What else might have been lost?