Borges is up to some delightful fuckery, playing with form, inventing books and authors and universes that are just as, to paraphrase, contaminated with fiction as our own history of the world. The stories are brief and vertiginous, mind-boggling and often cheeky. An undisputed masterpiece, even if I’m still partial to Calvino, even if Calvino himself would disagree with me (per his essay on Borges in Six Memos for the Next Millennium).
Pull quotes ⚭
History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what took place; it is what we think took place. (“Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”)
It was from this initial bravado of a few men that the all-powerful position of the Company—its ecclesiastical, metaphysical strength—was derived. (“The Babylon Lottery”)
In any case, there is nothing so contaminated with fiction as the history of the Company… (“The Babylon Lottery”)
This silent functioning, comparable to that of God, gives rise to all manner of conjectures. One of them, for instance, abominably insinuates that the Company is eternal and that it will last until the last night of the world, when the last god annihilates the cosmos. Still another conjecture declares that the Company is omnipotent, but that it exerts its influence only in the most minute matters: in a bird’s cry, in the shades of rust and the hues of dust, in the cat naps of dawn. There is one conjecture, spoken from the mouths of masked heresiarchs, to the effect that the Company has never existed and never will. A conjecture no less vile argues that it is indifferently inconsequential to affirm or deny the reality of the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance. (“The Babylon Lottery”)
Flaubert and Henry James have accustomed us to suppose that works of art are infrequent and laboriously composed. The sixteenth century (we need only recall Cervantes’ Viaje al Parnaso, or Shakespeare’s destiny) did not share this disconsolate opinion. Neither did Herbert Quain. He thought that good literature was common enough, that there is scarce a dialogue in the street which does not achieve it. (“An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain”)
You who read me, are you sure you understand my language? (“Library of Babel”)
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, that soon only soldiers and bandits will be left. To them I offer this advice: Whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past. (“The Garden of Forking Paths”)
“The explanation is obvious. The Garden of Forking Paths is a picture, incomplete yet not false, of the universe such as Ts’ui Pên conceived it to be. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words, but am an error, a phantom.” (“The Garden of Forking Paths”)
Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) an impossible idiom in which each individual object, each stone, each bird and branch had an individual name; Funes had once projected an analogous idiom, but he had renounced it as being too general, too ambiguous. In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. (“Funes, the Memorious”)
The reasons that one man may have to abominate another, or love him, are infinite: Moon reduced universal history to a sordid economic conflict. (“The Form of the Sword”)
That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvelous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable… (“Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”)
Someone may observe that no doubt the conclusion preceded the “proofs.” For who gives himself up to looking for proofs of something he does not believe in or the predication of which he does not care about? (“Three Versions of Judas”)
The truth was that Dahlmann read very little. The magnetized mountain and the genie who swore to kill his benefactor are—who would deny it?—marvelous, but not so much more than the morning itself and the mere fact of being. The joy of life distracted him from paying attention to Scheherezade and her superfluous miracles. Dahlmann closed his book and allowed himself to live. (“The South”)