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January 6, 2008
The Web Claims Jorge Luis Borges as Its Own
The web has claimed Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges as one of its own, as a lovely piece in the weekend NY Times explains. Works like The "Library of Babel", "Funes the Memorious", and "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" are deliriously fun and rewarding 40-year-old reads, deeply prescient with respect to our information-drenched, hyperlinked world of Wikipedia, Google, and even Techmeme.
As many readers of this site will already know, Borges is one of my favorite writers, both his fictions and his non-fictions, and so it's wonderful to see people, young and old, rediscovering him. My recommended list: The year-ago reissue of his majestic and brain-rewiring Labyrinths (with William Gibson introduction), plus the wonderfully eclectic and fun Selected Non-Fictions.
As a related aside, you can read Borges' "Library of Babel" on the interweb here.
When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proffered dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero.
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Paul, I love your blog. But it's generally considered rude to inline images from other sites on your own pages.
I like borges a lot too. thanks for pointing out this awesome article.
Thanks for this. Borges is a seriously fun author whom everyone should read, especially since reading his short works requires minimal effort for such a rich payoff. It's hard to find a better ROI in prose.