Macedonio Fernández was an enigmatic figure shadowing over the literary scene in Buenos Aires during the early 20th century.

In a new essay published in The Quarterly Conversation, Marcelo Ballvé writes about the influence of Macedonio on Argentina’s most famous writer - The Man Who Invented Borges.

Both men were enamored of speculative philosophy, and arguably it was Macedonio who was responsible for making a metaphysician out of Borges. Both writers were incessant explorers of a handful of themes: the inexistence of the individual personality, the elastic nature of time, the permeability of waking life to dreams and vice-versa; one might say: the instability of reality in general. In both writers’ work the supposedly bedrock concepts by which we live are revealed to be unstable isotopes, slippery and layered, none being in essence what they appear to be and all of course eminently moldable, especially within the pages of a story, poem, or essay.

I’ve started reading the blog Planet of the Blind by author Stephen Kuusisto, who has been “legally blind” since birth.

In a post titled “Spoons in the Snow“, Kuusisto describes attending the keynote address by Jorge Luis Borges at a conference on Nabokov in the late 1970s. Amusingly, it turns out that in the Q&A following Borges’ talk that Borges gave the impression that he had never heard of Nabokov. (It’s likely that Borges was simply toying with the Nabokov scholars.)

Writing is not another form of journalism

But the gem of Kuusisto’s post is not that anecdote but the lesson learned from Borges, or “How would I be able to write about the world if I couldn’t see it?”

“I thought some more about Borges.

A friend told me how his mother used to walk everyday in Buenos Aires with the poet. She would describe the things she was seeing in the central market and in turn Borges would narrate his version of their walk.

This emancipation from the photographic image is what allowed me to become a writer.

What a relief it is to write about the things I do not see!”

Irish writer Keith Ridgway has a post on his blog about Borges in Ireland and how a 5 year-old Ridgway met the Argentine writer in 1971.