“Then I reflected that all things happen to oneself, and happen precisely, precisely now. Century follows century, yet events occur only in the present; countless men in the air, on the land, and sea, yet everything that truly happens, happens to me. Después reflexioné que todas las cosas le suceden a uno precisamente, precisamente ahora. Siglos de siglos y sólo en el presente ocurren los hechos; innumerables hombres en el aires, en la tierra y el mar, y todo lo que realmente pasa me pasa a mí.”

“The Garden of Forking Paths”, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, is the best story by Borges. It’s certainly the story with the most interesting plot and it’s very readable, even to the person who finds Borges a little dull and challenging.

“The Garden of Forking Paths” is a mystery story on the surface but it is also a story that contains many famous Borgesian elements such as an infinite book, labyrinths, and multiple dimensions. If you’ve been following this blog series, then you have noticed that a lot of Borges stories deal with the aspect of time.

Because of the nature of the plot, I’m not going into much detail about this story. Like a lot of stories by Borges you will want to read the story at least twice since the ending changes your perspective and understanding of the story. Also, there are some paragraphs that you may have to read very closely in order to really understand what is the garden of forking paths.

“The Garden of Forking Paths” has obtained cult status among those interested in interactive fiction. The story explains, better than just about anything, the possibilities inherent in interactive fiction. Indeed, in my readings on digital media and computer gaming, Borges is cited quite often for his groundbreaking perspective.

“Little by little, a man comes to resemble the shape of his destiny; a man is, in the long run, his circumstances. Un hombre se confunde, gradualamente, con la forma de su destino; un hombre es, a la larga, sus circunstancias.”

“The Writing of the God”, La Escritura del Dios, is about a man in prison. Specifically, the man is an Aztec priest but it’s not really that relevant to the story. This is another one of those stories by Borges where you read the story not so much for the entertaining plot but for the meaning.

In the cell next to the prisoner is a tiger. Okay, at this point you know that you’re in a Borges story. Through a small opening in the wall the man can glimpse the tiger for a brief period every day. The man comes to believe that a message from god is written on the stripes of the tiger.

Borges raises a very interesting question in this story: “What sort of sentence, I asked myself, would be constructed by an absolute mind?” [¿Qué tipo de sentencia (me pregunté) construirá una mente absoluta?]

Borges was a strong agnostic. While he doesn’t attack conventional religions directly in this story, the question makes me wonder about the famous statements attributed to the Christian God through the words of Jesus…anyway, back to Borges.

“The Writing of the God” has other Borges characteristics, such as a dream within a dream within a dream. The prisoner eventually has a vision of God, an enormous Wheel made of water and fire. The Wheel was “made of all things that shall be, that are, and that have been, all intertwined, and I was one of the strands within that all-encompassing fabric.” [Entretejidas, la formaban todas las cosas que serán, que son y que fueron, y yo era una de las hebras de esa trama total].

Borges also makes a point of noting that evil is also part of that all-encompassing Wheel.

Through this vision the man comes to understand the writing on the tiger and that the man himself can become omnipotent, released from prison, and become immortal simply by speaking the words aloud. I’ll leave the conclusion of the story for you to read.

As I was re-reading the “The Writing of the God” the other night, I remembered the image of a divine Wheel that also exists in an essay by Borges. In “A New Refutatin of Time” Borges quotes from an Indian philospher on a 5th century Buddhist text: “Just as a rolling carriage wheel touches earth at only one point, so life lasts as long as a single idea.”

“A New Refutatin of Time” was written by Borges in the mid-1940s. We know from the Williamson biography that Borges spent several years composing “The Writing of the God”, which was published in the El Aleph collection in 1949. (Like many of Borges collected stories, the story might have first appeared in the magazine Sur but I don’t have the full chronology in front of me). So, the essay and the story are good companion pieces for reading.

In “A New Refutatin of Time”, the paragraph just before the mentioning of the Buddhist wheel is a quote from Schopenhauer, one of Borges favorite philosophers: “No man has ever lived in the past, and none will live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life, and is a possession that no misfortune can take away.”

Note: I’ve not yet verified that either of Borges quotes from the Visuddhimagga or Schopenhauer are accurate or yet another instance of Borges composing his own quotes; regardless, the statements are interesting.

There are a lot of Web sites focused on Borges. For the student and researcher the best site is the Borges Center at the University of Iowa. The site is available in English, French, and Spanish.

In their Borges Studies Online section are a number of excellent resources including articles as well as a few entire books. Most of the material is in Spanish but there are a few very good resources listed that are freely available in English.

One item that all readers of Borges should download is A Dictionary of Borges (PDF). This 270 page book written by Evelyn Fishburn & Psiche Hughes is completely available and a very enjoyable book to browse. While some of their definitions of places in Buenos Aires are not what I would say, the book is written for the person who has never been to Buenos Aires or doesn’t know much about the city or Argentine culture and history.

Another wonderful book available from the same site is by Beatriz Sarlo, Borges: A Writer on the Edge. It is also available in Spanish. I’m going to be talking more about Sarlo’s book in another posting.

Both of these works are out-of-print and very difficult to locate in print. So, it is great that these resources are available to everyone without having to track down a physical library. The copyright of the books are held by the authors and it’s very kind of them to allow the University of Iowa to make these works available.

More libraries, publishers, and universities should make out-of-print books available, particularly when the copyright is held by the author. All scholarly authors are likely to agree to that. Of course, maybe Google Books will eventually make the full text of the scholarly works that they scanned available someday. That will be a great asset for education in the developing world. (No scholarly writer is getting rich from royalties and only a very few creative writers ever make more than their advances). I can tell you that even here in Buenos Aires it is very difficult to find scholarly books in English and very few of these scholarly works are ever translated into Spanish. As a librarian, I’m passionate about expanding open access to scholarship.

Adrogue

Originally uploaded by sabor: limalimon.

Just to the south of the city of Buenos Aires is the small town of Adrogué. Borges spent a lot of time in Adrogué in the first part of his life. His family would go there often for the summers. According to the Williamson biography, Adrogué is also where Borges contemplated suicide at least once, possibly twice.

Adrogué is also the title of a beautiful poem by Borges that captures his feeling for the town, some lines:

On the far side of the doorways they are sleeping,

I, who am time and blood and agony.

Duermen del otro lado de las puertas

Aquéllos que por obra de los sueños

Son en la sombra visionaria dueños

Del vasto ayer y de las cosas muertas.

…

El antiguo estupor de la elegía

Me abruma cuando pienso en esa casa

Y no comprendo cómo el tiempo pasa,

Yo, que soy tiempo y sangre y agonía.

Libraries, labyrinths, and the fact that anything is ever written are constant themes in the works of poems. Here are a few lines from the poem “Alexandria, A.D. 641”. The date refers to the year that the great library at Alexandria was destroyed.

Unceasing human work gave birth to this
Infinity of books. If of them all
Not even one remained, man would again
Beget each page and every line,
Each work and every love of Hercules,
And every teaching of every manuscript.

Las vigilias humanas engendraron
Los infinitos libros. Si de todos
No quedara uno solo, volverían
A engendrar cada hoja y cada línea,
Cada trabajo y cada amor de Hércules,
Cada lección de cada manuscrito.

Towards the end of the poem, in typical Borges fashion, it is revealed that the first person narrator of “Alexandria, A.D. 641” is Caliph Omar, who ordered the destruction of the library. Yet, the concept of continually rebuilding the “infinity of books” also stands outside the history of the library of Alexandria and re-appears in several of other works by Borges.

Honestly, I keep wanting to find reasons to dislike Borges, to find evidence that he’s overrated. But from a literary perspective, the more I read, particularly the obscure works, the more I realize that he really was one of the truly great writers.

In the last two postings I mentioned that both The Circular Ruins and Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius are largely based on metaphysical idealism. Borges examined this topic in several of his essays. Now, I know this sounds like dry, boring stuff and, actually, that’s not far from the truth but the essays are essential to understanding Borges. Even Borges once described himself as “an Argentine adrift on a sea of metaphysics.” But, undoubtedly, some of his best writings are in his essays.

In The New Refutation of Time, written in the mid-1940s, Borges quotes the philosophers Berkeley, Hume, and Schopenhauer, as well as Bernard Shaw and a fifth-century Buddhist text. Fortunately, Borges rewards the reader with this observation:

Our destiny…is not terrifying because it is unreal; it is terrifying because it is irreversible and iron-bound. Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

Borges follows the observation and closes the essay with a revealing quote from the 17th-century German mystic Angelus Silesius :

Friend, this is enough. Should you wish to read more,
Go and yourself become the writing, yourself the essence.

At least according to Google Trends, which is a new tool from the folks at Google that allows you to waste more time online, uh, “compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics.”

This graph shows that in the U.S. more people are searching for the word tango than Buenos Aires. It also gives a sample of news articles that may be associated with spikes in traffic; for instance, who knew that tango had a fierce following in Utah?

The pattern of tango being more popular than Buenos Aires as a search term holds true for most non-Spanish speaking countries but when you limit the search to individual countries such as Argentina or Spain then you see that Buenos Aires is the much more popular term. But, hold on, the Mexicans seem to have a rising interest in tango.

Overall, across all regions of the world, Buenos Aires is a more popular search term than tango, as one would expect.

Google Trends is rather fun to play around with for a while but the comparison data is not very useful unless you choose terms that are very much related. For example, Buenos Aires and tourism are useless terms to compare since the latter returns all results based on tourism searches anywhere in the world.

You can have fun with certain terms, limited to a specific country. I can see pop culture researchers eventually using this tool to investigate topics such as Susana or Tinelli; you will need to have spent some time watching Argentine TV to understand that.

Or, in honor of the upcoming World Cup, compare searches for Maradona and Pele or both to Bechkam and Ronaldinho. Interestingly, in the UK, searches for Ronaldinho are rising quickly, whereas in Brazil hardly anyone is searching on Beckham.

Another problem with Google Trends is that there are no raw numbers associated with the searches, only trend lines. But if Google finetunes the capabilities, then Google Trends could be a very interesting tool.

“He understood that the task of molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work a man can undertake.” [Comprendió que el empeño de modelar la materia incoherente y vertiginosa de que se componen los sueños es el más arduo que puede acometer un varón.]

“The Circular Ruins” is my favorite story by Borges. The imagery leads to an ultimately terrifying revelation about reality.

The last five words of “The Circular Ruins” may have you deciding to re-read the entire story.

Update: Walrus books now has a Web site, go to www.walrus-books.com.ar

Walrus Books, my favorite English language bookstore in Buenos Aires, has just opened their new store in San Telmo. I had the pleasure today of being the first customer in their new location at Estados Unidos 617, near the corner of calle Per̼, opened Tuesday thru Sunday, 10am Р8pm.

Formerly operating out of their apartment in Palermo, Geoffrey and his wife are still in the process of stocking the new store but soon expect to have a selection of about 1,500 books. The space is charming and cozy, a comfy place to spend time browsing among the shelves. The customer service is outstanding and Geoffrey can always recommend a good read.

Most of the books are used, so the prices are very good. There is a large selection of contemporary literary fiction, classic literature as well as mystery and suspense novels, along with solid offerings of Latin American literature translated into English. The traveler should know that Walrus Books also has some travel guides such as Lonely Planet.

If you’re a local then Walrus Books is definitely the place to buy your English language books. If you’re just visiting Buenos Aires, then Walrus Books is a good place to stop in and buy a book for those lengthy bus trips or that long plane ride back home.

This sounds like an advertisement, I know. But it’s just an unsolicited endorsement from a happy customer. Indeed, their new store is dangerously close to where I live… need to adjust my budget, less bife and more books.

“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” appears as the first story in the Ficciones collection by Borges. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is one of the most difficult stories by Borges, probably not the story one should start with when first reading Borges. Yet, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is a highly crafted story with intricacies are unveiled with each reading.

Originally published in the literary magazine Sur in 1940 “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” sets the standard for the fiction that Borges would write.

Considering the complexities of the story for some readers I’m going to explain more about it than I do for the other stories. So, there is a spoiler here but one reads “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” for much more than the plot.

The story is presented as non-fiction, starting as a remembrance by the first-person narrator who talks of a discussion with the Argentine writer Bioy Casares, a close friend of Borges. The two writers are examining an encyclopedia article but an article that mysteriously only exists in one copy of an encyclopedia and not any other copy of the same edition.

The narrator then comes across a strange document (Orbis Tertius) that details the history of not only an unknown country (Uqbar) but of a planet (Tlön). For most of the story Borges goes to lengths to explain the culture of this planet, the languages, the histories, and all aspects of that world.

A postscript to the story is dated 1947. (Recall that the story was published years earlier). The postscript tells of a wealthy man in Memphis, Tennessee. A reporter for a Nashville newspaper has uncovered an entire encyclopedia about the world of Tlön in a Memphis library. Underlying the encyclopedia is a secret benevolent society that has existed for hundreds of years.

Finally, the narrator reveals that the history and knowledge of Tlön is the prevalent history and knowledge of the world today: “already a fictitious past has supplanted in men’s memories that other past, of which we now know nothing certain.” [ya en las memories un pasado ficticio ocupa el sitio de otro, del que nada sabemos con certidumbre – ni siquiera que es falso]

Thus, the story moves from being an intellectual exercise to one that reflects on the modern world. There are multiples levels in which the story can be read. At one level, it’s an indictment of the totalitarian governments that were sweeping the world during the 1930s and 1940s, governments that were erasing history and replacing it with fabrications of their own that many people readily accepted.

Disturbingly, that aspect of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is still relevant today, just consider some of the fictions issued by the Bush administration.

At another level, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is about how people know what they know and the nature of knowledge. In fact, it goes beyond that and examines the nature of reality. In one sense the story is a parody of the philosophy of idealism, knowledge based upon perceptions of the mind rather than real objects. Yet, Borges did not reject idealism and it comes to play in many of his writings.

What’s amazing about “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is that the more you learn about philosophy, then the greater your appreciation of this story and the immense talents of Borges.