'You Want to Be Immortal? Disappear.'

What has disappeared? Ambrose Bierce, Weldon Kees, Jimmy Hoffa. Aristotle’s second book of Poetics , three-decker novels, rhupunts. Typewriters, payphones, civility. In his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940; trans. James E. Irby, 1961), Jorge Luis Borges describes a fanciful world of radically subjective idealism, as premised by Bishop Berkeley. “Things become duplicated in Tlön,” he…