“But where have we wandered to?

“I do not recognize these aisles and counters.  Do they sell the newest wares that I have not the experience to read?  Do they sell the oldest, whose secrets I have never before been able to penetrate?

Lost in unfamiliar lands, we are merely creatures uninformed, foundering, asking, and finding.  Lost in the map of those lands that is the city among them and the market within it, we become one with the map, cartographer and cartograph, reader and read:

 

the separating line can only be scribed with the magic rule and measured with magic calipers, its position and direction only obtainable with an astrolabe set to unknown constellations in an imaginary sky, the distinction in the value of the respective sides calculable only in unmarked coins — a division which vanishes as we stare at it, which, as it vanishes, erases with it all freedom, all power and possibility of choice.” **