“El remordimiento” [Remorse] is a poem from the 1976 collection “La moneda de hierro” [The Iron Coin], selected lines:

I have committed the worst sin of all
That a man can commit. I have not been
Happy….
…
It never leaves my side, since I began:
This shadow of having been a brooding man.

He cometido el peor de los pecados
Que un hombre puede cometer. No he sido
Feliz….
…
No me abandona. Siempre está a mi lado
La sombra de haber sido un desdichado.

“No one cares about facts anymore. They are mere points of departure for speculation and exercises in creativity. In school we are taught Doubt, and the Art of Forgetting.”

“Ya a nadie le importan los hechos. Son meros puntos de partida para la invención y el razonamiento. En las escuelas nos enseñan la duda y el arte del olvido.”

Written in the 1970s those lines by Borges still seem applicable in today’s media soaked culture. “A Weary Man’s Utopia”, “Utopía de un hombre que está cansado” is one of the best late stories by Borges. There’s a slight flaw at the end, where Borges names a specific public figure of the 20th century, that lessens the impact of the story. Of course, others might read that flaw as the story’s strength.

The narrator is traveling across a vast plain, the open countryside, where he encounters a very odd, tall person that can only speak to him in Latin. Í’m purposefully leaving out some details since part of the enjoyment of this particular story is slowly understanding its setting.

There’s one point in the story where I laughed out loud, not something common for a Borges story. The narrator, who has taken an identity similar to the actual Borges, describes himself as one who writes stories of fantasy. The tall stranger says that he has read two books of fantasy: Gulliver’s Travels and Summa Theologica.

This is a world where there are no printed books. Printing has been forbidden since it is “one of the worse evils of mankind, for it tended to multiply unnecessary texts to a dizzying degree”, ha sido uno de los peores males del hombre, ya que tendió a multiplicar hasta el vértigo textos innecesarios.

As with other of his later stories, Borges is very explicit in what he is telling us, such as “it is not the reading that matters, but the rereading (emphasis mine), Además no importa leer sino releer.

As a librarian myself and someone very much into the digital culture, I found this story interesting because it talks about the proliferation of information long before the arrival of the Internet. The narrator states that everyone is “informed of the most trivial details of the latest conference of pedagogues….All this was no sooner read than forgotten, for within a few hours it would be blotted out by new trivialities.”

Borges also addresses the consumer culture of the times, which is not much different now than it was in the 1970s when he wrote the story. “Images and the printed word were more real than things…[people] believed that a piece of merchandise was good because the manufacturer of that piece of merchandise said that it was.”

This world gets bleaker with the more that the narrator learns. Unfortunately, I think that the story breaks down a little towards the very end with the flaw I mentioned previously. Regardless, it is a very powerful story with a lot of insights that can be applied to concerns facing our society today.

Without giving away the relevant context here, I do want to mention that there’s a wonderful line where the narrator says, “Every man must be his own Bernard Shaw, his own Jesus Christ, and his own Archimedes.” Cada cual debe ser su propio Bernard Shaw, su propio Jesucristo y su propio Arquímedes.

“To fall in love is to create a religion with a fallible god.” - Borges

That gem of a line is from an obscure essay by Borges on one of the most striking episodes in The Divine Comedy: Dante’s encounter with the lovers Francesca and Paolo, who are condemned to be tossed about in a windstorm in the second circle of Hell for their adultery.

The Williamson biography examines the life and writings of Borges largely through a Dantean perspective, that Borges was searching for a love that would bring him fulfillment. The guiding image for Dante Alighieri was Beatrice (a name that sounds much better in Italian than English); Williamson asserts that the guiding image for Borges was the Argentine writer Norah Lange (followed by a string of other women). In “The Meeting in a Dream” an essay written in 1948 and published originally in La Nación, Borges himself gives some credibility to the argument:

Beatrice existed infinitely for Dante. Dante very little, perhaps not at all, for Beatrice. All of us tend to forget, out of pity, out of veneration, this grievous discord which for Dante was unforgettable. I think of the two lovers that Alighieri dreamed in the hurricane of the second circle and who, whether or not he understood or wanted them to be, were obscure emblems of the joy he did not attain.

While paintings over the years often depict Paolo and Francesca embracing, I prefer to imagine the alternate image of the couple as being tossed separately about on the winds, forever in sight of one another, being thrown close together but then continually pulled back by the winds just before touching, eternally out of reach.

I can no longer think about this story without remembering last year’s remarkablefuerzabruta show in Buenos Aires. There was a segment depicting a man and a woman positioned on either side of a large rotating disk suspended in front of the audience. Amidst the sounds of a storm, the rotating disk moved faster and faster as the couple tried vainly to reach each other. While I’m not sure if it was intentional, I thought immediately of Paolo and Francesca when I saw the performance….Dante is all around.

In the very last line of the essay, the forty-nine year old, unmarried Borges writes that when he thinks of Paolo and Francesca - the two lovers forever united, though in the most unpleasant of circumstances - that he does so “with appalling love, with anxiety, with admiration, with envy.”