Borges

In the prologue to The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), the first half of what became Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges wrote that composing vast books is “a laborious and impoverishing madness”: setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be told perfectly well in a few minutes. “The better course of procedure,” he went on, “is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary.” Several of the stories that follow do exactly that. They review novels nobody wrote, annotate encyclopedias that were never printed, and give a bibliography for an author who never lived. …

For most of my life I read Jorge Luis Borges the way you visit a cathedral you don’t belong to: hat in hand, admiring the vaulting, aware the building was not built for you. A labyrinth to walk through and describe from outside, not a voice to live inside. Something has shifted. I can’t name the culprit — age, distance from the books that once impressed me for the wrong reasons, or just enough rereading to stop performing reverence and start actually listening — but going back to him now I find him sober rather than ornate, and I catch his cadence quietly steering my own sentences: the short declarative that ends a paragraph like a door closing, the fondness for stating an impossible thing in the flattest voice available. Saying that out loud feels presumptuous. A man who built a library with no walls does not get imitated by accident, and claiming his rhythm as an influence invites the obvious question of what exactly I think I’m doing. I believe it anyway. …