“There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless”
So said Jorge Luis Borges, for whom I have been reading these past weeks. The book, Fictions, holds a collection of the author’s works; including short stories and commentaries on imaginary books.
The style of writing, or the translated version of the original writing with what faith it keeps (Translated by Andrew Hurley) , is like nothing I have ever read before. The sheer power of imagination in this collection is overwhelming, in it you live myths, fantastic happenings, metaphysical encounters, and you are almost sure, after a story or two, that there will always be a twist at the end of the account.
A must read for any passionate, this collection is exquisite. I am, for many a great other thing, forever unable to repay the person who gave me this book as a gift. Grazie mille.
The experience of reading this book is physically original. When I started out, the uncanny events thrown my way in every line were a bit too much for my initial taste. The oddity lay in the fact that Borges, brilliant Borges, was relating things that were so supernatural, and he would tell them in such a matter-of-fact way that is quite confusing. Here lies the magic in this book; this is where you meet the man who forgets nothing, the poet who recreated Don Quixote word for word, the lottery in Babylon, and the library that holds all the volumes in the universe.
An ongoing obsession with mirrors, labyrinths, fantasy, and a living play on words and minds; Fictions. One of my favorite excerpts from Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is on the issue of time, and debates on time in the mysterious planet of Tlön:
“One of the schools of philosophy on Tlön goes so far as to deny the existence of time; it argues that the present is undefined and indefinite, the future has no reality except as present hope, and the past has no reality except as present recollection.
Another school posits that all time has already passed, so that our life is but the crepuscular memory, or crepuscular reflection, doubtlessly distorted and mutilated, of an irrecoverable process. Yet another claims that the history of the universe- and in it, our lives and every faintest detail of our lives- is the handwriting of a subordinate god trying to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe might be compared to those cryptograms in which not all the symbols count, and only what happens every three hundred nights is actually real. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake somewhere else, so that every man is in fact two men. “
Visual: Detail of central panel of The Temptation of St Antony by Bosch, Museu Nacional, Lisbon - Link.
