Jorge Luis Borges

If only I could do that.

Maybe I did have a little call toward writing because I remember walking home from junior high school when I was 11 and I was reading a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called By the Waters of Babylon.

We sat down and wept.

He's a Latin American magical realist, great writer.

12.

There is a story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, a story called The Book of Sand.

This story is about a book which seems to have an infinite number of pages.

Every time you open it, you see words and diagrams, sometimes pictures, but they're never the same.

And Ella, how about you?

So I today have a quote from Jorge Luis Borges from an essay of his called The Gospel According to Mark, and I actually pulled this quote because it is something I put in my commonplace book almost four years ago, three years ago, about the time we were on the podcast the first time.

Um, but it has increasing significance for me because, not only because Borges continues to be an author that just haunts me for, for some reason, um, but also because as my sister and I have expanded our studies and our studies have taken us all around the world in kind of an important sense, we have also found more and more that there is a universal tradition of story.

So this quote

quoteGenerations of men throughout recorded time have always told and retold two stories: that of a lost ship which searches the Mediterranean Seas for a dearly loved island, and that of a god who is crucified.

Oh, I like that quote.

You knew I would like that quote.

H- have I ever, uh, shared with any of you, um, the story of Borges' oppression at the, at the hands of the Argentine government?

[instrumental music] "When Ireneo Funes looked at a glass of wine on a table, he saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine.

He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at the dawn of the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book, which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of the Quebrancho." In the short story Funes the Memorious, Jorge Luis Borges explores what it would be like to have a perfect memory.

His character not only remembers everything he has ever seen, but every time he has seen it in perfect detail.

These details are so overwhelming, Funes has to spend his days in a dark room and can only sleep by imagining a part of town he has never visited.

I think he's one of the great short story writers ever.

Jorge Luis Borges, we talked about Borges a bit.

He thought that Wakefield, a story by Hawthorne, was the best short story ever.

I don't think it is.

Right.

Um, I don't know why but I'm thinking right now, you know, maybe about repetition and kind of mundanity but I'm thinking about one of my favorite ever lines in literature which is in, um, uh, or moments in literature which is in, uh, uh, Library of Babel by Borges where he's describing all these books and there's the one book that has repeating like nonsense characters for hundreds and hundreds of pages and then just on one page somewhere in the middle the phrase, "O time, thy pyramids," appears.

Oh.

And then it lapses, lapses back into nonsense.

And I think, you know, in a way-

Yeah

... like this is what, this is like a, you know, I think, I don't know, I guess I'm not up on the scholarship on Borges but, you know, he gets, y- people talk about these kind of thought experiments he does and the kind of mystical things and the kind of post-modern element of it but there's so much like, like true pure life in, [laughs] in it, you know?

Right.