Argentine author.
Argentine writer of short fiction and essays.
In response to what had become an annual question, Borges finally began joking about "the Swedish custom" of not awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature.
His style is so distinct that his name has become an adjective, "Borgesian". The term is generally applied to works that play with a readers perceptions of conventional reality, usually by destabilizing notions of time and space, blurring the boundaries of fact, fiction, and philosophy, or blending artistic invention with mock criticism and academia. Other elements of the Borgesian style are more subtle, and include an economy of language, an eclectic range of interests, and a dry, ironic humor.
Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 133, pp. 93-106. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.
His favorite film director was Josef von Sternberg , whom he called a "cinematic novelist".
Son of Jorge Guilhermo Borges (lawyer) and Leonor Acevedo.
Brother of Norah Borges (b.1901 d.1998).
The character of the old and blind librarian Jorge de Burgos in Der Name der Rose was based on Borges, according to author Umberto Eco.
The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put,off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner,or later all men will do and know all things.
It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of,composing vast books--setting out in five hundred pages an idea that,can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go,about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a,summary, a commentary on them. I have chosen to write notes on,imaginary books.
Philosophy springs from our perplexity.
[his view of the human condition] We walk the corridors, searching the,shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues,of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of,the future, collecting the thoughts of others, and--every so,often--glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the,information.
Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.
Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation. ", The New Yorker, July 7, 1986],Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterwards she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly.
Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.
A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.
I. . . have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.
A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.
He was very religious he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.
I prayed aloud, less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate speech.
It was under English trees that I meditated on that lost labyrinth: I pictured it perfect and inviolate on the secret summit of a mountain; I pictured its outlines blurred by rice paddies, or underwater; I pictured it as infinite—a labyrinth not of octagonal pavillions and paths that turn back upon themselves, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms. . . . I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite.
The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.
And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than present memory.
There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarna,Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
Paradise will be a kind of library,Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.
Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.
The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about. ” Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; “tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.
My father and he had cemented (the verb is excessive) one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether. They used to exchange books and periodicals; they would beat one another at chess, without saying a word.
It must be that I am not made to be a dead man, but these places and this discussion seem like a dream, and not a dream dreamed by me but by someone else still to be born.
The three of them knew it. She was Kafka’s mistress. Kafka had dreamt her. The three of them knew it. He was Kafka’s friend. Kafka had dreamt him. The three of them knew it. The woman said to the friend, Tonight I want you to have me. The three of them knew it. The man replied: If we sin, Kafka will stop dreaming us. One of them knew it. There was no longer anyone on earth. Kafka said to himself Now the two of them have gone, I’m left alone. I’ll stop dreaming myself.
In my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect.
Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.
There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.
Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread.
We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
I suspected once that any human life, however intricate and full it might be, consisted in reality of one moment: the moment when a man knows for all time who he is.
Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.
We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes.
And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I dream. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; now that I have unlimited power, I am going to create a tiger. Oh incompetence! Never do my dreams engender the wild beast I longed for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or bird.
One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.
The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.
I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely.
I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.
I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.
So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them immediately with literature.
The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.
We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods.
All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them.
I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite.
A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus--all these are forms we can fully intuit; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a mountainside, a flickering fire and its uncountable ashes, and the many faces of a dead man at a wake. I have no idea how many stars he saw in the sky.
Ferrari: How odd, Borges, it seems that we are talking constantly through memory. Sometimes, our conversations remind me of a dialogue between two memories. Borges: In fact, that’s what it is. If we are something, we are our past, aren’t we? Our past is not what can be recorded in a biography or in the newspapers. Our past is our memory. That memory can be hidden or inaccurate—it doesn’t matter. It’s there, isn’t it? It can be a lie but that lie becomes part of our memory, part of us. (Conversations, Vol. 1),We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.
I do not know which of us has written this page.
I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood.
Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.
Lost in these imaginary illusions I forgot my destiny – that of the hunted.
It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.
The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.
There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.
I cannot combine some charactersdhcmrlchtdjwhich the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology.
To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract.
The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.
So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.
If we think of the novel and the epic. . . The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero--a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.
I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.
There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.
Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.
But let no one imagine that we were mere ascetics. There is no more complex pleasure than thought, and it was to thought that we delivered ourselves over.
He [Omar Khayyam] is an atheist, but knows how to interpret in orthodox style the most difficult passages of the Koran; for every educated man is a theologian and faith is not a requisite.
I carried out my plan because I felt The Chief had some fear of those of my race, of those uncountable forebears whose culmination lies in me. I wished to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies.
There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.
The story of two dreams is a coincidence, a line drawn by chance, like the shapes of lions or horses that are sometimes formed by clouds.
All our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know.
When a writer dies, he becomes his books.
The image of the Lord has been replaced by a mirror.
I came to abominate my body, I came to sense that two eyes, two hands, two lungs are as monstrous as two faces.
We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away.
Art is fire plus algebra.
All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare,Patriotism, that least discerning of pas,As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that linedoes me no good, because, as I’ve already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless.
Day and night, their frail and crippled ships defy the tempest.
I think—the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center.
It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.
Novels include padding; I think padding may be an essential part of the novel, for all I know.
What you really value is what you miss not what you have.
What you really value is what you miss not what you have.
To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
Democracy is an abuse of statistics.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future. .
