Reencounter with Borges — On Finding My Own Style
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. …