…you don’t reach Serendib by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings … serendipitously.” ---The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor

In that period he came to know "the remarkable short fiction" of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse. Barth has since insisted that he was merely making clear that a particular stage in history was passing and pointing to possible directions from there.