By Jorge Luis Borges
I got this from the town library in May, 2024. It’s a huge book (almost 600 pages), plus it’s not one coherent story (obviously) but many (many many) smaller ones, so instead of doing the usual thing of reviewing afterwards, I’m going to take notes as I go through it. I won’t include all the stories, there’s too many and some I really don’t care for, but I’ll try as many as I can.
First off, initial impressions: he’s brilliant. I’ve been reading a lot of short fiction recently, and trying to get into more literary stuff, and he’s a master of the form. This doesn’t imply he’s always to my taste, sometimes the cultural differences lessen the appeal of the writing, and some of the stories have a Stephen King-esque quality to them where you’re not quite sure what you’re meant to have taken away from this slice of life, but even for these stories you can tell the prose has been constructed with a mix of scaffolding and the sheer art of someone who knows what they’re doing, like Van Gogh’s essence of the bull.
A later note: one of his key motifs is the sameness of all things. He compares everything to everything and finds that there was only one thing all along. All distinction is false and arbitrary, all delineation artificial. An inconsequential squabble between two men is as inscrutable as the face of God. Dreams are reality is a dream, Jesus is Judas, the killer is the victim, change is constancy, chance is fate. Once identified, this crops up everywhere and it adds a wonderful new dimension to every story.
The ideas are also fantastic, he seems to be almost as inventive as Greg Egan but with a broader scope, incorporating not just philosophy and maths, but linguistics and history and fantasy. He’s a philosopher, both in the vernacular and etymological senses of the word.
A particular strength of his is his throwaway lines. They’re packed alternately with aphorisms and wonderful imagery. He calls up worlds and alien sciences with a phrase, his paragraphs are gardens with blooms of imagery and metaphor. A lot of the quotations below are examples of these, because I’m a sucker for purple prose, and indeed sometimes he tinges indigo.
The collection is obviously translated, meaning it’s a combined expression of both Borges and Andrew Hurley. This has its effects, as nuance is lost: for example, armed with the cultural knowledge of Buenos Aires and the nuances of the original title, Hombre de la esquina rosada, Borges would be able to immediately evoke ‘an old neighbourhood to Buenos Aires, populated by toughs and knife fighters, and characterised by bars and bordellos in which that “scandalous” dance the tango was danced’ (from the translator’s notes).
I note this is reminiscent of the problem of translating the opening line of The Stranger, Aujourd’hui, maman est morte while maintaining the emotional nuance of the original.
This is obviously true throughout the collected works, but it’s not worth caveating everything with an explanation of the original language so I’ll just do it in an ad-hoc way, if at all.
Finally, he’s very quotable. My favourite quotes page is in need of a clean-up, but it would quickly be filled by notes from this book, so I’ll confine them here.
The collection starts off with this book, of longer stories defined as “exercises in narrative prose”.
Dedication: I inscribe this book to S.D.—English, innumerable, and an Angel. Also: I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow—the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
Preface to the 1954 Edition: I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. […] I would venture to say that the baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.
The book overall seems to be what it says in the title: a chronicle of evildoers, murderers, and villains. However, I was a little bored by a lot of these so I skipped them.
This is a short story of an encounter between the protagonist, a gang member in a small backwater borough of Buenos Aires, and an intimidating knife-fighter who challenges and humiliates the gang leader. Although the plot is perhaps prosaic on the surface (the fighter enters a bar/pub/brothel where a tango is being danced, challenges and humiliates the leader, leaves with his mistress, and is implied to be killed by the protagonist off-screen), it is written engrossingly and with the result that (despite my limited cultural knowledge) I got a visceral understanding of the psychologies and power-plays involved. It was like watching a tightly-scripted character study: the actions and responses were like layering a polarising filter over a sheet of plastic, revealing the rainbow stresses and strains dictating the dooms of the characters, fixed from the moment they stepped on stage.
This is a group of very short stories which Borges either made up or adapted from other works. This was a favourite, I’m a sucker for this style of vignette or thought experiment, and Borges seems to be a master of the art, conjuring up and dismissing implicatures, histories and lives with the concision and perfection of an orchestral conductor.
Many of these also began with exultations of Allah, in the style of Arabic stories, which I’m also a sucker for (c.f. the Sandman story about the city of Baghdad).
A brief vignette of a theologian after he dies, condemned to a sordid place to continue his writings. Meandering, and seemingly without purpose or moral, and yet one of those stories where you feel a leviathan is swimming beneath you in the deep dark, and you could join with it, if only you knew where it was.
A classic fairy tale, of a king who inherits a locked door to which all previous kings have added their own locks. He enters, and finds, in order: 1. a room full of frozen figures of warriors and horses, ready to charge 2. the emerald table of Suleyman, son of David 3. two books: one black, full of arcane knowledge, and one white, and unreadable 4. a true map of the world 5. a mirror showing one’s ancestors and descendants, from Adam to “those who shall hear the Trumpet” 6. a powder with the power of transmuting silver to gold 7. a long room with an inscription at the end, saying whomsoever should open the tower, their kingdom will be taken by the warriors in the first room
A wonderfully comedic story about a poor man in Cairo who receives a dream that he should go to Isfahan, in Persia, where he would find great treasure. He goes, and is beaten by a mob, and imprisoned, and eventually interrogated by the Wálee(?) who asks him why he has come. When he responds, the Wálee laughs uproariously, and says he also received a dream that he should go to Cairo where he would find great riches. Being a wise man, he ignored the dream, unlike the poor fool. He dismisses him back to Cairo, but the poor man, curious, goes to the location the Wálee dreamed of, which is in his own house, and does indeed find great riches!
Another classic fairy tale (similar to that one in Stories for Boys?) about a man who wants to learn magic from a wizard, and in return promises to owe him favours. Well, he learns magic, and receives news that he has been promoted to bishop, to cardinal, to Pope, and at each turn the wizard asks him to promote his son to his old position, and at every turn the man refuses. When he has finally become Pope, and refused again, the illusion vanishes, to reveal them still in the room years earlier, having revealed the man had no intention of owing any favours to the wizard.
A story bordering on cosmic horror of a wizard who is forced by a cruel king to show him the wonders of the world through a mirror of a pool of ink. Soon, a mysterious man keeps appearing somewhere in the images, just standing there. Eventually the king is scared and orders the wizard to show him the execution of the man, whereupon it is revealed the man is the king himself. When the man is killed in the mirror, the king drops dead.
That dead man whom I abominate held within his hand all that dead men have seen and all that living men see: the cities, climes, and kingdoms into which this world is divided, the hidden treasures of its centre, the ships that sail its seas, its instruments of war and music and surgery, its graceful women, its fixed stars and planets, the colors taken up by the infidel to paint his abominable images, its minerals and plants with the secrets and virtues which they hold, the angels of silver whose nutriment is our praise and justification of the Lord, the passing-out of prizes in its schools, the statues of birds and kings that lie within the heart of its pyramids, the shadow thrown by the bull upon whose shoulders this world is upheld, and by the fish below the bull, the deserts of Allah the merciful.
Borges claims this story is from The Lake Regions of Equatorial Africa, by Richard Francis Burton. It is very clearly not.
I think this book is made of more experimental, fantastical stories, where most of them in the previous books were set in the real world. I really like them.
The foreword:
It is a laborious madness, and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages what can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them. That was Carlyle’s procedure in Sartor Resartus, Butler’s in The Fair Haven—though those works suffer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and not a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books. Those notes are [[#Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius]] and [[#A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain]].
….I don’t know where to start with this one.
It’s the story of a doubly-fictional world called Tlön, invented in the story by a secret society called Orbius Tertius (third world, idk if this is symbolic) and expressed through a series of encyclopaedias reminiscent of the Britannica (or the Galactica). In the story is a description of the philosophy and science of this world, fundamentally different from our own in a way that is beautifully fleshed-out and detailed, similar to how Greg Egan starts with a premise and explores all its implications and ramifications, in the best tradition of speculative fiction. In the story, the doubly-fictional world is so absorbing, so detailed that it begins to take over society, to the extent the “real” world in the story is neglected in favour of this constructed one.
The start has some great quotes
Mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind.
My father had forged one of those close English friendships with him (the first adjective is perhaps excessive).
I now held in my hands a vast and systematic fragment of the entire history of an unknown planet, with its architectures and its playing cards, the horror of its mythologies and the murmur of its tongues, its emperors and its seas, its minerals and its birds and fishes, its algebra and its fire, its theological and metaphysical controversies—all joined, articulated, coherent, and with no visible doctrinal purpose or hint of parody.
There’s a wonderful passage describing why the world of Tlön was created: in essence, the man who started the society wanted to prove to the nonexistent God that “mortals could conceive and shape a world”.
There’s also a bit about why the world of Tlön proved more interesting to their society than their real world:
Ten years ago, any symmetry, any system with an appearance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—could spellbind and hypnotise mankind. How could the world not fall under the sway of Tlön, how could it not yield to the vast and minutely detailed evidence of an ordered planet? It would be futile to reply that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but orderly in accordance with divine laws (read: “inhuman laws”) that we can never quite manage to penetrate. Tlön may well be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth forged by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men. Contact with Tlön, the habit of Tlön, has disintegrated this world. Spellbound by Tlön’s rigor, humanity has forgotten, and continues to forget, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels.
Here he again takes his favourite framing device of describing a fictional book with the plot that he’d like to write, without actually having to write it.
It’s really good though! It’s a story of a gradual rise from hell to heaven. A student, after a night of violence in Bombay, encounters a man on a rooftop who is vile and uncouth. However, in the course of conversation, the man describes his hatred for a woman he has met. The student decides that the wrath of such a man is a hymn of praise, and decides to find this woman. He falls in amongst men of iniquity, until there is a brief flash of grace in one of their actions. He knows that wretch is incapable of such an action, and thus he must have reflected one of his acquaintances. He finds the acquaintance, and discovers him slightly better. The chain progresses, and he finds himself orbiting and drawing closer to one who is named Al-Mu’tasim.
Borges notes that to pull off such a plot, the author needs to invent a variety of signs that point to this angelic person, and yet he must not allow that person to become ‘a mere phantasm or convention’ - that is, the person at the end of the rainbow must be a real person, not a moral or an ideology.
He then goes on to say the fictional book alternately presents Al-Mutasim as a person, as a person in search of his own Al-Mu’tasim, as the student himself, and as a godlike figure.
The fictional book ends with the student passing through a doorway to meet Al-Mu’tasim, and the real story ends with the comment that one of the signs of grace the student encounters is when one debater decides not to rebut another’s sophisms in order to not gloat at his defeat.
Does a book change depending on who we think wrote it? Similar to the philosophy of Tlön, where it is considered all authors are one, and all books written by the same.
The classic story of one who creates a simulacrum, only to discover that they themselves are a simulacrum. It seems this question of identity, and whether the urge to replicate and procreate is a fundamentally human instinct or whether it is natural to all entities (the answer, as always, is that it is central to life born of evolution by natural selection).
This version however is written in a dream-like style I haven’t seen before, however.
It describes a man who arrives at the temple of a profane god, choked in jungle, and wishes to create another man through dream. His initial attempt, of lecturing and engaging in dialectical philosophy with an infinite amphitheatre of cloudy forms to select one to hone, fails, and so instead he spends years dreaming most of the day, laboriously constructing a physical body, until he reaches the point where only the spark is left. He talks to the god of the temple, who is Fire, who agrees to enliven the dreamed man, with the result that only the god and the first man would know that he is a simulacrum. This having been done, the man’s work is finished, and he spends his years in imagination and languor, contemplating the dreamed man’s life, until one day a wildfire approaches the temple. Believing the end of his days has finally arrived, he walks into the fire—only to find that the fire also leaves him untouched; he himself is a dreamed man.
An ambiguous, sinuous tale about the lottery held in Babylon. Initially a simple prosaic lottery, betting money to win more, it grows monstrously through the tugs and repulsions of societal desires and physical practicalities into an infinitely recursive and subdivided game of chance determining every outcome of every event in Babylon, influencing not only the people who are automatically enrolled, but physical events of the flights of birds, the blowing of winds and the cycle of the sea, with the result that anything that happens can be attributed to the mysterious, cloaked Company which runs the lottery.
The final question, of course, is whether the Company even exists, or has ever existed, and whether this lottery is merely the constant and omnipresent effects of Chance which determine the lives of us all.
I really liked this one: the question of how we interpret events when we know they are intentional or random, and the undercurrents of conspiracy and pantheism were so well done.
Here, he examines the works of the fictional author Quain, and thus plays with the form of story without having to write the story himself, framing the essay as a formal review, and annoyingly, he does it really well.
The story devices themselves are wonderfully creative and I really would like to read them – perhaps [[The House of Leaves]], if I ever get round to it? The devices themselves are
This is that classic thought experiment, of the library which contains all books, but here, where it was exemplified, it is compounded, extended, and explored. It’s a brilliant and terrifying idea: one clear implication is that there is no nonsense in such a library: every conceivable string of characters, no matter how seemingly inane, is already contained somewhere in the library: it has already been foreseen, and in one or more of the Library’s secret languages (whose grammar and explanation is also included in the library, along with countless incorrect ones which may or may not define their own languages) hides a terrible significance, is “filled with tenderness and terror”, and is “the mighty name of a god”.
“To speak is to commit tautologies”
The story characterises our incomprehension of infinity: such a library is infinitely recursive. Borges only misses the application of information theory (although I’m also not sure how applicable its results might be): given a set of characters and a message length, there is a theoretical limit to how much information can be expressed. Thus, it is possible that not all ideas can be expressed in this library, even through the mechanism of constructing a language that can express them, and the explanation of that language, and so on. Any ideas not expressible in this way (and thus not included in the Library) must be in some sense transfinite?
The story ends with the idea that though there is a finite unique number of books: the Library may be infinite, but periodic: each period, the books repeat. This, of course, only increases the madness.
So so good.
A great story about a Chinese person turned German spy who has been discovered through a colleague ratting him out. Desperate to communicate the name of a German city which he has discovered will soon be bombed to the German command before he is caught, he visits a man named Albert in the countryside, a scholar of the works of Ts’ui Pen, who is our character’s ancestor.
Ts’ui Pen devoted his life to composing a book and a labyrinth, for which his ancestors revile him: nothing came of it except a jumble of incoherent manuscripts, and no labyrinth was ever found. However, Albert has discovered that the book and the manuscript referred to the same thing: Ts’ui Pen constructed an infinite labyrinth called the Garden of Forking Paths, which is a fictional many-worlds novel. In it, every single future branching from every single decision is explored.
Albert then comments that he does not believe Ts’ui Pen was a man of idleness, and he would not have simply played at variations. Rather, the true philosophical subject of the work was revealed in the single word not included in the manuscripts: time, much like ‘in a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only word that must not be used? Chess’.
‘The Garden of Forking Paths was an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as conceived by Ts’ui Pen. Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times’
In the end, our character shoots Albert, and is immediately captured and sentenced to death. The real reason he went to see him: the city’s name was Albert, and he knew it would be reported in the news.
This was one of the more poetically written stories, and despite the only minimal mapping between the Garden and the main plot, I quite liked it.
The title in Spanish is meant to mean something like “Funes, he of outstanding memory” or “Funes the memorious”. It’s about a young man with an absolutely eidetic memory, who can perceive irreducible complexity in every second of every day, and yet for all that is incapable of abstraction or connection, which by necessity requires the elision of some detail. An illustration of this is his numbering system, which involves a separate phrase for every number up to 24,000. This, of course, meant it was the opposite of a system, and meant it could not be used for anything but recall.
His main project was to categorise all of his memories, reducing every day to 70,000 recollections so he could finally work on understanding them. Of course, this would be slower than the rate at which he would accrue memories, rendering it hopeless.
‘Swift wrote that the emperor of Lilliput could perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock; Funes could continually perceive the quiet advances of corruption, of tooth decay, of weariness. He saw—he noticed—the progress of death, of humidity. He was the solitary, lucid spectator of a multiform, momentaneous, and almost unbearably precise world. Babylon, London, and New York dazzle mankind’s imagination with their fierce splendor; no one in the populous towers or urgent avenues of those cities has ever felt the heat and pressure of a reality as inexhaustible as that which battered Funes, day and night, in his poor South American hinterland.’
I’m not sure whether this story was meant to be more poetic or speculative; I feel it did not reach the mark in either.
A tale about an IRA soldier who emigrated to South America. In the story, he explains the scar on his face to his interlocutor; he and a man named Moon were caught in fighting and sheltered in a house, and he discovered on the eve of a fight that Moon was an absolute coward, and had sold him out. In revenge, he chases him through the house and slashes his face with a scimitar. He was Moon. Honestly? Kind of mid.
A more interesting story! Once again, it’s framed as a story he intends to tell, of a man who is the leader of a resistance movement, until it is discovered that he is a spy. Signing his own death warrant, he colludes with his own men to frame his death as a murder by the oppressors, thus achieving the goal of punishing him while elevating him to martyrdom and sustaining the movement. The man who discovers this, hundreds of years later, realises he is also a part of the plot, and destroys all his research to maintain it. I quite liked this one, it had Truman show-esque (or -core?) hints of hundreds of people acting out a play on the stage of a city, to ensure that hundreds of thousands were deceived.
This is a story that I originally found many years ago, in the course of reading [[HPMoR]]. In it, a detective investigating a series of murders is led by certain signs and clues to believe that they are a religiously symbolic sacrificial ritual. This causes him to travel by himself to the place he believes the last murder will take place at the appropriate time, only to find himself caught by a mob boss whose brother he had killed. It turns out that the mob boss, knowing the detective’s inclinations, plotted these murders and planted those clues to make him leap to the esoteric and unlikely solution, to lure him to a place where he could be killed, as he is at the end of the story.
It has some good quotes: the ever chilling
The first letter of the Name has been written.
And the penultimate line,
“The next time I kill you,” Scharlach replied, “I promise you the labyrinth that consists of a single straight line that is invisible and endless”.
Perhaps one of my favourite stories in this collection, this is about a Jewish playwright in Prague who is arrested and sentenced to death. His magnum opus is an unfinished lyrical play, an exploration of the circular psyche and delirium, whose last scene is exactly the same as the first, with the characters unchanged and yet with the audience’s perception entirely changed by what has proceeded. The play is unfinished by the morning of his execution; in desperation he prays to his God to grant him the time to finish his work, and he hears a voice saying his wish has been granted.
As the sergeant calls out the final order, the physical universe stops; the rain is frozen in space, the bullets immobile, all sound and movement paused. He himself is unable to move, to make a sound, he is as frozen as what is a moment from killing him. And so he begins to finish his play, entirely in his head.
He did not work for posterity, nor did he work for God, whose literary preferences were largely unknown to him. Painlessly, motionlessly, secretly, he forged in time his grand invisible labyrinth.
As he finishes his play, finding his final epithet, a drop of water rolls down his cheek. He begins a cry, he shakes his head—and the bullets hit him.
Utterly brilliant.
An exploration of the role of Judas in the Christian theology, presented once again as a critique of the views of a fictional character. This story is almost irreducibly complex, so instead of a critique and summary I’ll present some of the most interesting lines.
It is not one thing, but all things which legend attributes to Judas Iscariot that are false.
[…] de Quincey speculated that Judas had delivered up Christ in order to force Him to declare His divinity and set in motion a vast uprising against Rome’s yoke; Runeberg suggests a vindication of a metaphysical nature.
Runeberg continues: The Word, when it was made Flesh, passed from omnipresence into space, from eternity into history, from unlimited joy and happiness into mutability and death; to repay that sacrifice, it was needful that a man (in representation of all mankind) made a sacrifice of equal worth. Judas Iscariot was that man. Alone among the apostles, Judas sensed Jesus’ secret divinity and His terrible purpose. The Word had stooped to become mortal; Judas, a disciple of the Word, would stoop to become an informer (the most heinous crime that infamy will bear) and to dwell amid inextinguishable flames.
Later, in refutation of the fictional criticisms of his work,
The acts of [an apostle] merit the most sympathetic interpretation we can give to them. To impute his crime to greed […] is to settle for the basest motive. Nils Runeberg proposed a motive at the opposite extreme: a hyperbolic, even limitless asceticism. The ascetic, ad majorem Dei gloriam, debases and mortifies the flesh; Judas debased and mortified the spirit. He renounced honour, goodness, peace, the kingdom of heaven, as others, less heriocally, renounce pleasure. A footnote: Borelius sarcastically asks, Why did he not renounce renunciation? Why not renounce the renunciation of renunciation? […] In adultery, tenderness and abnegation often play a role; in homicide, courage; in blasphemy and profanation, a certain satanic zeal. Judas chose sins unvisited by any virtue: abuse of confidence […] and betrayal.
And finally,
God, argues Nils Runeberg, stooped to become man for the redemption of the human race; we might well then presume that the sacrifice effected by Him was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by omissions. […] To claim that He was man, and yet was incapable of sin, is to fall into contradiction […] Kemnitz will allow that the Redeemer could feel weariness, cold, distress, hunger, and thirst; one might also allow Him to be able to sin and be condemned to damnation. […] God was made totally man, but man to the point of iniquity, man to the point of reprobation and the Abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the lives that weave the confused web of history: He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; he chose an abject existence: He was Judas.
It’s so good.
Borges says this story is a scene taken from an implication in another book. In it, two people duel, and one is slain. Kind of boring.
This is a strongly allegorical story of a cult known as the Cult of the Phoenix, whose members (as is explained, at great length, over a great many sentences with a large number of commas) are of all social strata, all geographies and ethnicities, all walks of life, and all deaths, with no distinguishing features from those not in the cult.
I have said that the history of the Cult records no persecutions. That is true, but since there is no group of human beings that does not include adherents of the sect of the Phoenix, it is also true that there has been no persecution or severity that members of the cult have not suffered and carried out.
The only religious practice of the cult is the performance of a ritual known as the Secret: members of the Cult will not have heard of the cult, but will identify themselves with the Secret. In particular,
The Secret is transmitted from generation to generation, but tradition forbids a mother from teaching it to her children, as it forbids priests from doing so […] a child may catechize another child.
The Secret is trivial, brief, sacred and a bit ridiculous, and the performance of it furtive. I particularly liked this:
There are no decent words by which to call it, but it is understood that all words somehow name it, or rather, they inevitably allude to it—and so I have said some insignificant thing in conversation and have seen adepts smile or grow uncomfortable because they sensed I had touched upon the Secret.
Clearly, sex, but I’m intrigued by the idea that the ritual is a function of social mores; perhaps in Borges’ time it was sex, perhaps later being gay. What is it now?
Another tale which is on the surface mundane, of a hospitalised man on the brink of death suddenly becoming better, and travelling to the plains in the heart of his country, being challenged to a knife fight, and stepping outside to confront his death, but deeply complex and intricately written, with many possible interpretations; that he never left the hospital and that the knife fight is his confrontation with disease; that the man is not a man but a country in decline confronting its historical and mythologised past; or any number of other readings.
It’s very well written: here are the last couple of lines.
As he crossed the threshold, he felt that on that first night in the sanatorium, when they’d stuck that needle in him, dying in a knife fight under the open sky, grappling with his adversary, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a fiesta. He sensed that had he been able to choose or dream his death that night, this is the death he would have dreamed or chosen. Dahlmann firmly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to manage, and steps out into the plains.
A longer piece, but not so incisive as the others, about a soldier who goes in search of a river that can make you immortal, and the city of those who have found it beside it. It plays with themes of identity and memory: over the soldier’s long life, until he finds the river that strips immortality, he becomes many different people and his memories of the past jumble and become confused. It ends with
I have been Homer; soon, like Ulysses, I shall be Nobody; soon, I shall be all men—I shall be dead.
This is two stories, told by a narrator, with the final suggestion that they are both the same story, in the end. The first is of a Lombard warrior named Droctulft, who, during the siege of Ravenna, deserted his army and died defending the city he had been attacking. There are a couple of quotes I really liked:
Let us imaging Droctulft sub specie æternitatis—not the individual Droctulft, who was undoubtedly unique and fathomless (as all individuals are), but rather the generic “type” that tradition (the work of memory and forgetting) has made of him and many others like him.
And
He comes from the dense forests of the wild boar and the urus; he is white, courageous, innocent, cruel, loyal to his captain and his tribe—not to the universe. Wars bring him to Ravenna, and there he sees something he has never seen before, or never fully seen. He sees daylight and cypresses and marble. He sees an aggregate that is multiple yet without disorder; he sees a city, an organism, composed of statues, temples, gardens, rooms, tiered seats, amphoræ, capitals and pediments, and regular open spaces. None of those artifices (I know this) strikes him as beautiful; they strike him as we would be struck today by a complex machine whose purpose we know but in whose design we sense an immortal intelligence at work. Perhaps a single arch is enough for him, with its incomprehensible inscription of eternal Roman letters—he is suddenly blinded and renewed by the City, that revelation. He knows that in this city there will be a dog, or a child, and that he will not even begin to understand it, but he knows as well that this city is worth more than his gods and the faith he is sworn to and all the marshlands of Germany.
Borges notes that he was not a traitor, but an illuminatus: a convert.
The second half of the story is of an Englishwoman in Argentina who was stolen in a raid and was now the wife of a minor chieftain. Behind the tale,
one caught glimpses of a savage and uncouth life: tents of horsehide, fires fueled by dung, celebrations in which the people feasted on meat singed over the fire or on raw viscera, stealthy marches at dawn; the raid on the corrals, the alarm sounded, the plunder, the battle, the thundering roundup of the stock by naked horsemen, polygamy, stench, and magic.
At the end,
Thirteen hundred years and an ocean lie between the story of the life of the kidnapped maiden and the story of the life of Droctulft. Both, now, are irrevocable. The figure of the barbarian who embraced the cause of Ravenna, and the figure of the European woman who chose the wilderness—they might seem conflicting, contradictory. But both were transported by some secret impulse, an impulse deeper than reason, and both embraced that impulse that they would not have been able to explain. It may be that the stories I have told are one and the same story. The obverse and reverse of this coin are, in the eyes of God, identical.
This was an interesting one, about the limits of cultural understanding. It is about a 12th century Islamic scholar in Spain who is working on interpreting and commenting on the works of Aristotle. He comes across two words which “no one in all of Islam could guess at the meaning” of: tragedy and comedy. He attends a soirée at a Qur’anist scholar’s house, where a fellow guest relates a story of attending a party in China where a troupe were performing a play; the guests are unable to comprehend this.
Later, when discussing an old poetic metaphor, that fate is like a blind camel, Averroës refutes the point that it has been worn thin by saying
First, that if the purpose of the poem were to astound, its life would be not measured in centuries but in days, or hours, or perhaps even minutes. Second, that a famous pet is less an inventor than a discoverer. In praise of ibn-Sharaf of Berkha, it has many times been said that only he was capable of imagining that the stars of the morning sky fall gently, like leaves falling from the trees; if that were true, it would prove only that the image is trivial. The image that only a single man can shape is an image that interests. no man. There are infinite things upon the earth; any one of them can be compared to any other. Comparing stars to leaves is no less arbitrary than comparing them to fish, or birds. On the other hand, every man has surely felt at some moment in his life that destiny is powerful yet clumsy, innocent yet inhuman. It was in order to record that feeling, which may be fleeting or constant but which no man may escape experiencing, that Zuhayr’s line was written. No one will ever say better what Zuhayr said there. Furthermore (and this is perhaps the essential point of my reflections), time, which ravages fortresses and great cities, only enriches poetry. At the time it was composed by him in Arabia, Zuhayr’s poetry served to bring together only two images—that of the old camel and that of destiny; repeated today, it serves to recall Zuhayr and to conflate our own tribulations with those of that dead Arab. The figure had two terms; today it has four. Time widens the circle of the verses, and I myself know some verses that are, like music, all things to all men.
In the end, Averroës notes
Aristu [Aristotle] gives the name “tragedy” to panegyrics and the name “comedy” to satires and anathemas. There are many admirable tragedies and comedies in the Qur’an and the mu’allaqat of the mosque.
The author ends by noting that while the story is of a man who by the circle of Islam is bound and condemned to never understand the meaning of the words tragedy and comedy, so he is himself bound to never understand this Islamic scholar.
Another of my favourite stories: the Zahir is any object which, once seen, lodges itself in the mind of the seer, and drives them slowly insane (according to others). I particularly liked the line
When every man on earth thinks, day and night, of the Zahir, which will be dream and which reality, the earth or the Zahir?
Of a man trapped in prison with a jaguar on the other side of a stone wall, with a window set into it. He realises God’s phrase, which gives the speaker power, is written on the jaguar’s skin, and spends years memorising the pattern of spots, which he can only glimpse once a day at midday, as the jaguar pads past the window. When he finally has a flash of inspiration, he comprehends the phrase and is fundamentally changed by it, such that he no longer wishes to use it.
A king builds a magnificent labyrinth, and invites a guest of his, another king, to enter it, to mock his simplicity. Having been lost and humiliated, he emerges, and returns with his armies, and lays waste to the kingdom. He binds the defeated king and takes him to his kingdom, where he shows him his labyrinth, which has “no stairways to climb, nor doors to force, nor wearying galleries to wander through, nor walls to impede thy passage”. He leaves him to die in the desert.
A less fantastical story than the others, but written in clean, sweeping lines that recall an allegory or fable. A judge is sent to a city in Raj-era India to quell riots; he does so brutally. Soon, he vanishes, and the narrator begins to search for him. He finds a small house, with an old man at the doorstep, who narrates that the people kidnapped the judge, and in order to put him on trial, picked a madman to judge the judge, so that the voice of god would be heard through him. The judge was put to death; the narrator, pushing into the house, finds a celebration, a bloodied sword, and the body of the judge.
This was an interesting concept: that of a point in space which contains all other points in the universe. The story is of the father of the narrator’s love, who composes a shockingly awful (in the narrator’s view) poem about the entire world, and reveals, on the eve of his house being demolished, that the Aleph exists in his basement. The narrator goes to see it, and what he sees is described in the following (in what I’ve come to realise is a characteristic of Borges’ writing: a long descriptive list):
I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spiderweb at the centre of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet (and none of them reflecting me), saw in a rear courtyard on Calle Soler the same tiles I’d seen twenty years before in the entryway of a house in Fray Bentos, saw clusters of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, water vapour, saw convex equatorial deserts and their every grain of sand, saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget, saw her violent hair, her haughty body, saw a cancer in her breast, saw a circle of dry soil within a sidewalk where there had once been a tree, saw a country house in Adrogué, saw a copy of the first English translation of Pliny (Philemon Holland’s), saw every letter of every page at once (as a boy, I would be astounded that the letters in a closed book didn’t get all scrambled up together overnight), saw simultaneous night and day, saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal, saw my bedroom (with no one in it), saw in a study in Alkmar a globe of the terraqueous world placed between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly, saw horses with wind-whipped manes on a beach in the Caspian sea at dawn, saw the delicate bones of a hand, saw the survivors of a battle sending postcards, saw a Tarot card in a shopwindow in Mirzapur, saw the oblique shadows of ferns on the floor of a greenhouse, saw tigers, pistons, bisons, tides, and armies, saw all the ants on earth, saw a Persian astrolabe, saw in a desk drawer (and the handwriting made me tremble) obscene, incredible, detailed letters that Beatriz had sent Carlos Argentino, saw a beloved monument in Chacarita, saw the horrendous remains of what had once, deliciously, been Beatriz Viterbo, saw the circulation of my dark blood, saw the coils and springs of love and the alterations of death, saw the Aleph from everywhere at once, saw the earth in the Aleph and the Aleph once more in the earth, and the earth in the Aleph, saw my face and my viscera, saw your face, and I felt dizzy, and I wept, because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has ever truly looked upon: the inconceivable universe.
He proceeds to imply to the father that there’s nothing there and that he needs a break from the city lmao.
The story is surrounded by guff which honestly it could have done without, but the Aleph is an interesting idea.
This is a collection of much shorter, more fantastical stories. The quality was variable - some were great, some bad, some downright confusing. I haven’t included all of them below.
The collection ends with an afterword:
[…] A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
A parable about Homer slowly going blind, which parallels and perhaps describes Borges’ experience of going blind himself. The last paragraph:
With grave wonder, he understood. In this night of his mortal eyes into which he was descending, love and adventure were also awaiting him. Ares and Aphrodite—because now he began to sense (because now he began to be surrounded by) a rumour of glory and hexameters, a rumour of men who defend a temple that the gods will not save, a rumour of black ships that set sail in search of a belovèd isle, the rumour of the Odysseys and Iliads that it was his fate to sing and to leave echoing in the cupped hands of human memory. These things we know, but not those that he felt as he descended into his last darkness.
A brief vignette of childhood passions, and how we only approximate their ghosts later in our lives:
In my childhood I was a fervent worshipper of the tiger—not the jaguar, that spotted “tiger” that inhabits the floating islands of water hyacinths along the Paraná and the tangled wilderness of the Amazon, but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can be faced only by men of war, in a castle atop an elephant. I would stand for hours on end before one of the cages at the zoo; I would rank the vast encyclopædias and natural history books by the splendour of their tigers. (I still remember those pictures, I who cannot recall without error a woman’s brow or smile.) My childhood outgrown, the tigers and my passion for them faded, but they are still in my dreams. In that underground sea or chaos, they still endure. As I sleep I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realise that it’s a dream. At those moments, I often think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and since i have unlimited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger. Oh, incompetence! My dreams never seem to engender the creature I so hunger for. The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up, or it’s flimsy-looking, or it has impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it’s altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or a bird than a tiger.
Two speakers discuss two speakers who discuss committing suicide so that they might speak more freely; they do not remember whether they did so.
A diatribe against…toenails?? I didn’t get this one.
Of a man who in his youth feared mirrors and their unreality; he tells a woman later in his life, and goes insane after they separate, covering all the mirrors in her house because she sees her face in them, perpetually watching.
A proof of the existence of god: you close your eyes and see a flock of between one and ten birds. If god exists, the number of birds is definite, because god knows how many birds you saw. If god doesn’t exist, the number if indefinite, because no one can have counted. You saw between one and ten birds, but you did not see two birds, or three birds, or four, or so on. The integer number of birds you saw is inconceivable. Ergo, god exists.
Huh??
On the ultimate complexity of the world and the futility of poetry:
It was neither that afternoon nor the next that Giambattista Marino died—that illustrious man proclaimed […] as the new Homer or the new Dante—and yet the motionless and silent act that took place that afternoon was, in fact, the last thing that happened in his life. His brow laureled with years and glory, the man died in a vast Spanish bed with carven pillars. It costs us nothing to picture a serene balcony a few steps away, looking out toward the west, and, below, marbles and laurels and a garden whose terraced steps are mirrored in a rectangular pool. In a goblet, a woman has set a yellow rose; the man murmurs the inevitable lines of poetry that even he, to tell the truth, is a bit tired of by now: Porpora de’ giardin, pompa de’ prato, Gemma di primavera, occhio d’aprile…
The purple of the garden, the magnificence of the lawn,Spring’s blossom, April’s eye` Then the revelation occurred. Marino saw the rose, as Adam had seen it in Paradise, and he realised that it lay within its own eternity, not within his words, and that we might speak about the rose, allude to it, but never truly express it, and that the tall, haughty volumes that made a golden dimness in the corner of his room were not (as his vanity dreamed them) a mirror of the world, but just another thing added to the world’s contents. Marino achieved that epiphany on the eve of his death, and Homer and Dante may have achieved it as well.
On the worlds that go with someone when they day. Initially about an old man who is the last Saxon, the last one to have seen the pagan rites before the Roman conquest, it becomes an examination of the infinite number of events that die with every person’s death, unless the universe itself has a memory.
In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the Battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die?
A brief essay on how time converts events to symbols, and strips them of their venom:
In a hallway I saw a sign with an arrow pointing the way, and I was struck by the thought that that inoffensive symbol had once been a thing of iron, an inexorable, mortal projectile that had penetrated the flesh of men and lions and clouded the sun of Thermopylæ and bequeathed to Harald Sigurdson, for all time, six feet of English earth. […] Cross, rope, and arrow: ancient implements of mankind, today reduced, or elevated, to symbols. I do not know why I marvel at them so, when there is nothing on earth that forgetfulness does not fade, memory alter, and when no one knows what sort of image the future may translate it into.
A description of Shakespeare as a hollow shell, with no one inside; thus could he be “Cæsar, who ignores the admonition of the sibyl, and Juliet, who hates the lark, and Macbeth, who speaks on the moor with the witches who are also the Fates, the Three Weird Sisters”. When at last he dies,
He discovered himself standing before God, and said to Him: I, who have been so many men in vain, wish to be one, to be myself. God’s voice answered him out of a whirlwind: I, too, am not I; I dreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your own work, and among the forms of my dream are you, who like me are many, yet no one.
On a dream of the return of the gods, and yet they are now inhuman, beastly, predators—in the dream, they are slaughtered by humanity.
God explains to a leopard that it must live and die in prison such that Dante will see him and include him in his poem, and the leopard accepts but does not understand because the world is exceedingly complex for a savage beast; God explains to Dante what his purpose was, and, astonished, he blesses the bitterness of his life, but on waking, he does not remember or understand this precious knowledge, because the world is exceedingly complex for men.
On Borges’ relationship with his public figure; on their differences in taste, and literature, and on his doom to oblivion, and the fleeting remnants of him that will survive in that other man.
I am not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page.
On an Empire whose love of cartography is so great that they compose a map the size of the empire itself; their descendants leave it to ruin, and there exist only tatters now, “inhabited by Animals and Beggars”.
On the fundamental oneness of those artefacts responsible for the taking of life, from the bullet which killed JFK, to
the silken cord given to viziers in the East, the rifles and bayonets that cut down the defenders of the Alamo, the triangular blade that slit a queen’s throat, the wood of the Cross, and the dark nails that pieced the flesh of the Redeemer, the poison kept by the Carthaginian chief in an iron ring on his finger, the serene goblet that Socrates drank down one evening. In the dawn of time it was the stone that Cain hurled at Abel, and in the future it shall be many things that we cannot even imagine today, but that will be able to put an end to men and their wondrous, fragile life.
This collection’s foreword has the lovely and useful paragraph,
I do not have an aesthetic. Time has taught me a few tricks—avoiding synonyms, the drawback to which is they suggest imaginary differences; avoiding Hispanicisms, Argentinisms, archaisms, and neologisms; using everyday words rather than shocking ones; inserting circumstantial details, which are now demanded by readers, into my stories; feigning a slight uncertainty, since even though reality is precise, memory isn’t; narrating events […] as though I didn’t fully understand them; remembering that tradition, conventions, “the rules”, are not an obligation, and that time will surely repeal them—but such tricks (or habits) are most certainly not an aesthetic.
I also liked and disliked these in turn; the liked ones are below.
On a student who lives with the native tribes in the West of America for two years, in search of the secrets their rituals revealed to them. He does so; he comes back; he will not tell the secret, for although he could express it in “a hundred different and even contradictory ways”, it is beautiful, and not as important as the way there.
It ends with the wonderfully concise
Fred married, divorced, and is now one of the librarians at Yale.
A refutation of the act of miracle. Borges does not understand the Lord’s Prayer, and he decides to attempt a prayer that is personal, not inherited. He explores the idea that miracles themselves cannot happen, because of the “web of iron” of causality; not is forgiveness meaningful, since it “purifies the offended party, not the offender, who is virtually untouched by it”. He tells us his only real wish is to die.
The designs of the universe are unknown to us, but we do know that to think with lucidity and to act with fairness is to aid those designs (which shall never be revealed to us).
God save you, reader, from long forewords.
Perhaps I didn’t read them closely enough, or I’m not old enough (Borges was 70 when he wrote these) but these were…kind of boring? Well-executed, of course, but the plots were pedestrian and the language floral without adding much save the tone of Borges himself.
The only one of any interest was Brodie’s Report, of a man describing the land of the Yahoos, but even that I didn’t like at all, really. I’ve included the first plot below because I wrote it before realising all the stories were like it.
Of two brothers who are in love with the same girl; they share her, and quarrel; they sell her to a brothel, but keep visiting secretly and individually; they buy her back, and eventually kill her, to stop the strife between them.
This is another good summary of these stories.
Borges meets his younger self, and they discuss. I really liked this one: the inevitability of time, transforming one into the other, and that “each of [them] was almost a caricature of the other”. It turns out that the older does not remember meeting himself when he was younger because the younger was dreaming, but the other was awake, at the time of the encounter.
They quote Walt Whitman:
L’hydre-Univers tordant son corps écaillé d’astres
The hydra-Universe, twisting its body covered in star-scales
At the end of the meeting, they agree to meet again the next day, but both of them, deeply disturbed by the encounter, miss the rendezvous.
One of the more lusciously and piercingly written stories, about Borges’ encounter with a Norwegian woman named Ulrikke for a nychthemeron in York. She is wonderfully described:
“I am a feminist,” she said. “I have no desire to imitate men. I find their tobacco and their alcohol repulsive.” The pronouncement was an attempt at wit, and I sensed this wasn’t the first time she’d voiced it. I later learned that it was not like her—but what we say is not always like us.
I clarified that I myself was Colombian. “What is ‘being Colombian’?” “I’m not sure,” I replied. “It’s an act of faith.” “Like being Norwegian,” she said, nodding.
A line somewhere in William Blake talks about girls of soft silver or furious gold, but in Ulrikke there was both gold and softness. She was light and tall, with sharp features and grey eyes. Less than by her face, I was impressed by her air of calm mystery. She smiled easily, and her smile seemed to take her somewhere far away. She was dressed in black—unusual in the lands of the north, which try to cheer the dullness of the surroundings with bright colours. She spoke a neat, precise English, slightly stressing the r’s. I am no great observer; I discovered these things gradually.
A really great one - a group of men (it’s always men only in Borges’ world) decide that they need to create a Congress of the World, to represent all the people in it. They buy books, they have philosophical discussions, they travel and decide on languages; and in the end, the leader realises the world itself is its own Congress, with everyone alive a part of it, and yet only that small group aware of the fact. They sell their land, burn their books, and depart.
I loved the idea that the only way to represent the irreducible complexity of the world is to instantiate the world: it is its own description and representative, its own summary and appendix.
I can tell that I am growing old; one unequivocal sign is the fact that I find novelty neither interesting nor surprising, perhaps because I see nothing essentially new in it—it’s little more than timid variations on what’s already been.
Oh nights, oh shared warm darkness, oh love that flows in shadow like a secret river, oh that moment of joy in which two are one, oh innocence and openness of delight, oh the union into which we entered, only to lose ourselves afterward in sleep, oh the first soft lights of day, and myself contemplating her.
A brief cosmic horror story, of a house which is remodelled to fit an alien being. I liked this bit, about the narrator entering the house but not comprehending what he saw because he didn’t understand it:
In order to truly see a thing, one must first understand it. An armchair implies the human body, its joints and members; scissors, the act of cutting. What can be told from a lamp, or an automobile? The savage cannot really perceive the missionary’s Bible; the passenger does not see the same ship’s rigging as the crew. If we truly saw the universe, perhaps we would understand it.
A story similar to the Three Versions of Judas, on a sect inspired by Judas’ actions as the only other conscious and knowing participant in “the tragedy of the Cross”, apart from Jesus himself. I’m seeing a pattern here of Borges’ fascination with the dual, the mirror, and the hidden and unlooked-for divinity.
The “Thirty” refers to the thirty pieces of silver.
A wonderfully surreal tale which is more obscure than the others in this section. An Irish king defeats the Norwegians; he charges his poet with recording the battle:
I am Olan. For twelve winters I have honed my skills at meter. I know by heart the three hundred sixty fables which are the foundation of all true poetry. The Ulster cycle and the Munster cycle lie within my harp strings. I am licensed by law to employ the most archaic words of the language, and its most complex metaphors. I have mastered the secret script which guards our art from the prying eyes of the common folk. I can sing of love, of cattle theft, of sailing ships, of war. I know the mythological lineage of all the royal houses of Ireland. I possess the secret knowledge of herbs, astrology, mathematics, and canon law. I have defeated my rivals in public contest. I have trained myself in satire, which causes diseases of the skin, including leprosy. And I also wield the sword, as I have proven in your battle.
The first poem the poet returns with is a classical masterpiece, technically accomplished and a summation and crowning achievement of poetry in Ireland until that point. The king asks him for another, better still. This second poem is a postmodern work, strange, incomprehensible at times. The king delights in it, and asks for yet another. The poet returns a year later, haggard, with no manuscript. He recites a single line, a manifestation of Beauty, which is “a gift forbidden mankind”.
Of the poet, we know that he killed himself when he left the palace; of the king, that he is a beggar who wanders the roads of Ireland, which once was his kingdom, and that he has never spoken the poem again.
A tale I didn’t quite understand, of a nation whose poetry is a single repeated word. The narrator, after an encounter with a native poet, lives a life, and returns, understanding why this is. I think perhaps I’d need to be older to understand this one.
The word is “undr”, which means wonder. I quite like that.
It’s very similar to the above story, of literatures contained in a single word.
A conception of a future utopia. I originally disliked and disagreed with this idea of a future; drab and lifeless, all ambition lost, no cities or past, no or very few books, and then I read the title. I don’t know whether this is an accurate conception of a utopia or a good future, or what the distinction of the two might be, but the title is apt.
Borges notes in the afterword that this is the most honest and the most melancholy work in the book.
Two men want a university position; one, recognising that the other, as a Puritan and a Westerner, will bend over backwards to understand an opposing point of view (as divined from a conversation where he, a Northerner, defended the Confederacy in the civil war), writes a monograph opposing his views, understanding that this will endear him.
More of an anecdote, really, but nicely written. He notes in the afterword that he’s always been fascinated by Americans’ obsession with ethics, and that this was an attempt to portray that.
A parallel and companion to the Library of Babel, about an infinite book, whose pages are numbered in an arbitrary order. The implementation was decent, and I felt the average positive integer problem was not addressed, but an interesting idea.
The dual to The Other, where Borges meets his older self on his deathbed and they discuss. More of a self-reflection, a criticism of his work and his efforts, than a story.
Another story of an artefact; here, blue discs from a plateau above a village on the outskirts of Lahore, which break mathematics: they are uncountable. Halve a pile of ten and you will get two, halve that and you will get three hundred. Much like the narrator in The Zahir, the disks drive the narrator mad; he gives them as alms to a beggar, and never sees them again.
To Paracelsus’ house a man comes, and asks to be his disciple; first, he requests proof of his gifts. Paracelsus replies that he does not need “credulity”, or support, but belief. The man demands proof, of a rose burnt and reincarnated, and throws it into a fire. Paracelsus replies that the rose will remain ash, and the man realises that Paracelsus is a fraud who has been exposed. Embarrassed at this act, the man leaves; Paracelsus reincarnates the rose.
A really nice story on the distinction between faith and belief, from the other side of what Borges normally writes about.
A lovely tale, and poetic, about a man who accepts Shakespeare’s memories from another. He lives his life, but understands that the memories themselves are not the man:
Chance, or fate, dealt Shakespeare those trivial terrible things that all men know; it was his gift to be able to transmute them into fables, into characters that were much more alive than the grey man who dreamed them, into verses which will never be abandoned, into verbal music.
Eventually, the flood of memories begins to drown his own, and he gives the memories to another and attempts to divert his life from the study of the bard. He finds all avenues lead to Shakespeare; his final solution is “strict, vast music—Bach.”
Quietness, subtlety, a laconic terseness—these are the marks of Borges’ style. It is a style that has often been called intellectual, and indeed it is dense with allusion […] But it is also a simple style: Borges’ sentences are almost invariably classical in their symmetry, in their balance. Borges likes parallelism, chiasmus, subtle repetitions-with-variations.
Borges uses words for their etymological value, which can be deeply unsettling to the reader. Although this is of course implemented in the Spanish, he uses Latinate roots which often transfer to the English. See, for example, the “unanimous night”, or the “splendid woman” whose red hair glows.