This is a short and marvelous essay about the value of abstractions (including scientific knowledge) by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Though written in the 20th Century, Borges cleverly styled it as an extract from a historic travel book dating from 1658 entitled "Travels of Well-Behaved Young Gentlemen", by the fictitious author Suarez Miranda. 

Borges here touches upon several key mathematical concepts that we discuss in this book. 

(i) A complex system - such as the geography of a country - is irreducibly complex, hence any representation (i.e. a model) must necessarily be an abstraction, or simplification of the original.

(ii) Two extremes in representing a complex system are obviously useless: a reductionistic representation that is too abstract to adequately describe the system, versus a representation that is just as complex as the system itself (as in the absurd example described by Borges).

... En aquel Imperio, el Arte de la Cartografía logró tal Perfección que el Mapa de una sola Provincia ocupaba toda una Ciudad, y el Mapa del Imperio, toda una Provincia. Con el tiempo, estos Mapas Desmesurados no satisficieron y los Colegios de Cartógrafos levantaron un Mapa del Imperio, que tenía el Tamaño del Imperio y coincidía puntualmente con él. Menos Adictas al Estudio de la Cartografía, las Generaciones Siguientes entendieron que ese dilatado Mapa era Inútil y no sin Impiedad lo entregaron a las Inclemencias del Sol y los Inviernos. En los Desiertos del Oeste perduran despedazadas Ruinas del Mapa, habitadas por Animales y por Mendigos; en todo el País no hay otra reliquia de las Disciplinas Geográficas.

Suárez Miranda: Viajes de varones prudentes, libro cuarto, cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658.

... In that empire, the art of Cartography reached such perfection that the map of a single province occupied the whole of a city, and the map of th empire took up an entire province. With time, those exaggerated maps no longer satisfied, and the Colleges of Cartographers came up with a map of the empire that had the size of the empire itself, and coincided with it point by point. Less addicted to the study of Cartography, succeeding generations understood that this extended map was useless, and without compassion, they abandoned it to the inclemencies of the sun and of the winters. In the deserts of the west, there remain tattered fragments of the map, inhabited by animals and beggars; in the whole country there are no other relics of the geographical disciplines.

(Translation updated by Nikos Salingaros)