... One of the schools of Tlon goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. ... Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.

[The narrator describes a parable where X lost nine coins on a certain road on Tuesday, Y found four coins on the same road on Thursday--rusted by Wednesday's rain, Z found three coins on the road on Friday, and finally X found two coins in his house on Friday. The question arises are the found coins the same coins that were lost?]

The language of Tlon resists the formulation of this paradox; most people did not even understand it. The defenders of common sense at first did no more than negate the veracity of the anecdote. They repeated that it was a verbal fallacy, based on the rash application of two neologisms not authorized by usage and alien to all rigorous thought; the verbs "find" and "lose," which beg the question, because thy presuppose the identity of the first and of the last nine coins. . . .They explained that equality is one thing and identity another... They said that the heresiarch was prompted only by the blasphemous intention of attributing the divine category of being to some simple coins and that at times he negated plurality and at other times did not. They argued: if equality implied identity, one would also have to admit that the nine coins are one.
... [a hundred years later] a thinker no less brilliant than the heresiarch but of orthodox tradition formulated a vary daring hypothesis. This happy conjecture affirmed that there is only one subject, that this indivisible subject is every being in the universe and that these beings are the organs and masks of the divinity. X is Y and is Z. Z discovers three coins because remembers that X lost them; X finds two in the corridor because he remembers that the others have been found....