Upon meeting myself at the coffee shop last week, the departing me told the arriving me that I ought to get busy reading some stuff by Jorge Luis Borges. The arriving me was thoroughly preoccupied with other things: papers to grade, Greek things to read, and searches for a more materialistic outlook to be discovered. Howsomever, the arriving me soon became the departing me and Borges tapped me on the shoulder (metaphorically of course) and reminded me of his presence.
Upon further review, I had some trepidation to Borges. I never quite know what to think about authors whose political viewpoints run semi-antithetical to my own. We aren’t exactly perpendicular, Borges and I, but we aren’t parallel either, so we must at some point cross each other, and this crossing can lead to a serious falling out depending on the nature of the angle. But this isn’t always the case. Some crossings have spent so long in developing that the deceptive appearance of parallelism can really quite mute the conflict that arises at crossing and turn it more into a friendly encounter – like the happily long-running disagreements that frequently occur between comrades over tea.
I think our crossing is the delicate kind that occurs over tea. We agreed, for example, on dictatorships and their resulting terrors, and while I may be more sympathetic to communist ideology that Borges, we can at least agree that libraries are very important places and that our fathers’ book collections made a profound influence upon us at an early age, and, you know, that is very nearly enough for our crossing to not dissuade us to be enemies.
I prefer the solid reality of fiction to most other forms of writing. It’s not that I’m against poetry, it’s just that I think most poets wanted to write novels but were too busy doing other things and had to abbreviate their work, or, as in the case of Coleridge, were entirely too distracted by the multiplicity of words and their multiplicity of meanings so as to be driven truly mad by the infinite possibilities of expressing one single thought. (Browning is nice though.) This fact alone makes it all the more interesting that I found myself reading Borges’s poetry to my partner in the wee hours of the night and discussing his obsession with duality.
I remember the first Borges poem I ever read. It was not suggested by my Latin American literature teacher, though I’m sure he may have mentioned Borges frequently enough (but seeing as how he was a communist, my teacher that is, I’m sure it was in a very disapproving way). Rather it was recommended by my philosophy instructor who was, at the time, teaching a class on Plato, Socrates, Descartes, and Kant. I can’t make the connection between Borges and those other august thinkers at this time, so I’m not sure how Borges came up, but I still have a copy of the original email (is such a thing even possible in the digital age?) in which he sent two of the poems under discussion and the volume in which they could be found – it was Dreamtigers. Much later in life, I needed to buy a book so as to begin reading something, though with me the buying of the book does not necessarily mean I have to read the book I just purchased. I’ve never understood the phenomenon, though I frequently find myself in used bookstores buying something just so I can go home and pick up an unread book sitting on my shelf. I bought at this time a compilation of Borges’s poems which included one of the poems mentioned by my old philosophy instructor along with selections from most of his published collections of poems. I have been reading this book recently.
It is appropriately titled Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poems. It is an appealing quality paperback that cost me $19, though in its favor are impressed concentric circles on the front and the uneven pages of fancier volumes. It has the poem in its original Spanish on the left-hand side of each page and an English translation on the right. Sometimes I read the Spanish original first, but this doesn’t happen too often because I’m often eager to read the English. I shall keep the title of my favorite poem to myself, though I may at times hint at it, and instead mention some others that I also like. One is ‘Anticipation of Love,’ which has a beautiful line explaining why we watch the ones we love while they are sleeping:
you will give me that shore of your life that you yourself do not own
Another poem I like is ‘Odyssey, Book Twenty-three.’ I think this poem speaks to my yearly obsession with The Odyssey, which I teach without fail to distrusting high school students so they might learn to love both guile and beauty so they may better get along in life. And ‘Simplicity’ also speaks to me, though by no means because it is simple or makes things simpler, but perhaps because it reminds me of certain parts of the Upanishads, which in turn remind me of comments made by Aristotle in De Anima, which, at this late date, I may or may not be remembering correctly, but certainly bring back memories of the professor who first suggested some poems of Borges for me to read.
Even more recently I bought a collection of Borges’s writing that had to do with writing; it was appropriately titled On Writing. The short essays ‘Literary Pleasure’ and ‘The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader’ are both helpful in reminding readers why they originally became readers – because something they read grabbed them individually and made reading the best thing they could be doing at that particular moment, regardless (and this important) of the perfection or imperfection of the text. Readers, says Borges, can too quickly become critics and read only with the critical mind; I find that this happens to me too, as it did with him. When this happens, they may have lost their reading way. But our history of reading can at least remind of us of the joy we once experienced when reading was good enough by itself.
Another thought runs through the various essays which span from his early years to his later ones: the sheer magnificence that occurs when an author creates an alternate version of the world. Borges talks about Joyce in this regard and the timelessness of Cervantez; I am reminded of Tolkien. Borges, like Chabon, also reminds us of the complete arbitrary nature of categorization. Detective novels may be great literature, and we shouldn’t let ourselves be tricked into thinking that they are somehow lesser just because they are detective novels. As a connoisseur of detective novels, I particularly admire this line of thinking.
I am glad that I reminded myself to read Borges. Poetry too often eludes me, or me it, and Borges’s poems were a much-needed corrective to my potentially narrow reading habits. His essays have many great attributes, the least of which is their length: they are short and consequently I can usually read one or two a day while in the bathroom. Brevity aside, the essays cover two topics that are of central importance to my solitary life – reading and writing - and there are times when it is necessary to consider those two activities from the craft perspective.
