Borges and God

[Druidic]

Borges and God | by Jorge Luis Borges | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

[Druidic]

A slight change of subject though F.D. and Borges had much in common.


And how in hell did Durrenmatt get dragged into True Detective?

True Detective | STEVENHARTSITE



btw, I don't agree with this review. I liked the first season fine.

[Druidic]

Borges on Pleasure Island - The New York Times

[xylokopos]

I am re-reading Borges these days, and only yesterday I read once more his Argumentum Ornithologicum from Dreamtigers/El Hacedor. It is obviously meant as a parody of the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God, but still has formal elegance and traces of conviction - Borges was a genius, even stuff he wrote as a piss-take is literary and compelling. But when Borges declares in an interview that he does not believe that God exists as an individual or as a trinity, one has to ask, who declares that, Borges the writer or that other Borges (that Borges wrote about in Borges and I)? I don't doubt Borges's sincerity or the straightforwardness of his answer but a) Borges is not one for unambivalent declarations in general and b) it seems his concern is with words and meaning and their precision (or lack thereof), hence the digression about Whitehead and the perfect dictionary.

[marioneta]

I read somewhere that Borges would pray a "Hail Mary" before going to bed, even in old age, because his mother had asked him to do this on her deathbed. He continued this practice in memory of his mother, even though stating that he did not believe in prayer or God. This anecdote could be apocryphal, but then again it seems to be in character with the tongue in cheek attitude to life that Borges embodied.

[xylokopos]

Quote

Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth. I have journeyed in search of a book, perhaps of the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can scarcely decipher what I write, I am preparing to die a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once dead, there will not lack pious hands to hurl me over the banister; my sepulchre shall be the unfathomable air: my body will sink lengthily and will corrupt and dissolve in the wind engendered by the fall, which is infinite. I affirm that the Library is interminable. The idealists argue that the hexagonal halls are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They contend that a triangular or pentagonal hall is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that to them ecstacy reveals a round chamber containing a great book with a continuous back circling the walls of the room; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. That cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice me, for the time being, to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose consumate center is any hexagon, and whose circumference is inaccessible.

The Library of Babel, 1941 [tr. Anthony Kerrigan]

[xylokopos]

A few days ago, I was perusing the shelves inside Ludwig Mayer's exceptional bookstore in Jerusalem, trying to figure out the pricing system: in the top right corner of the title page of every book, there was a circular cluster of penciled numbers.

I picked up a copy of Borges' Ficciones, and addressed the stern-looking proprietor:

- Excuse me, I am trying to divine the price of the book...there are quite a few numbers written..

Another patron, an older man who had been engaging the owner in conversation before I interrupted, turned to me, surprised, and said in perfect, if accented, English:

- My good sir, you are holding a book by Borges and you are inquiring after the exact meaning of the numbers...surely, you see the irony?

- You are right, I replied, though it seems appropriate that there would be a constellation of numbers whose meaning is hard to decipher in this book...the whole store seems to me to be a garden of forking prices.

He smiled and we both looked at each other, content in a way that I have not often experienced in my life.

- It is the one price in the centre of all the others, said the owner, the other numbers represent the original price and the price I paid to purchase the book, etc.

I nodded. The other man said, have a good day. I wished him the same and saw him walk out into the street, a man who had traversed the alleyways of the Argentine's labyrinthine mind, the same paths I had walked, the paths that led us to this ancient and unfathomable city.