Miroslav Holub, Brief Thoughts on Maps

The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian detachment in the Alps
sent a reconnaissance unit out onto the icy wasteland.
It began to snow
immediately,
snowed for two days and the unit
did not return.
The lieutenant suffered:
he had dispatched
his own people to death.

But the third day the unit came back.
Where had they been? How had they made their way?
Yes, they said, we considered ourselves
lost and waited for the end. And then one of us
found a map in his pocket. That calmed us down.
We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm and then with the map
we discovered our bearings.
And here we are.

The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map
and had a good look at it. It was not a map of the Alps
but of the Pyrenees

Miroslav Holub, Brief Thoughts on Maps.

Borges on bad tangos

“… One of my friends, a professor from Paraguay, took me to his home in Texas. He said he had tangos and asked if I wanted to hear them. I said, “Yes, of course.” He played all the tangos I loathe, actually. For instance, “Flaca fane y descangallada”, “La cumparsita”… I thought to myself, “What a disgrace; these aren’t tangos, how horrible this is!” And while I was thus judging them intellectually, I felt my own tears. I was crying with emotion. That is to say, I condemned that music intellectually and yet at the same time it had touched me and I was crying…”

Chartres

Richard Powers, in the Goldbug Variations, attributes this story to the painter Ben Shahn: 

... an itinerant wanderer travelling over country roads in thirteenth century France comes across a man exhaustedly pushing a wheelbarrow full of rubble. He asks what the man is doing. "God only knows. I push these damn stones around from sunup to sundown, and in return they pay me barely enough to keep a roof over my head." Further down the road the traveller meets another man, just as exhausted, pushing another filled barrow. The second man says "I was out of work for a long time. My wife and children were starving. Now I have this. It's killing but I'm grateful for it ." Just before nightfall, the traveller meets a third exploited stone-hauler. When asked what he is doing, the fellow excitedly replies, "I'm building Chartres Cathedral."