Borges: The Library of Babel [pdf]

I posted this to HN 10 months ago but it got no attention.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/04/virtual-librar...

Here are several of my favorite excerpts by him/related to him to which you might enjoy if you haven't already came across them:

"You were asleep. I wake you. The vast morning brings the illusion of a beginning. You had forgotten Virgil. Here are the hexameters. I bring you many things. The four Greek elements: earth, water, fire, air. The single name of a woman. The friendship of the moon. The bright colors of the atlas. Forgetting, which purifies. Memory, which chooses and rediscovers. The habits which help us to feel we are immortal. The sphere and the hands that measure elusive time. The fragrance of sandalwood. The doubts that we call, not without some vanity, metaphysics. The curve of the walking stick the hand anticipates. The taste of grapes and of honey."

"Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone."

"All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare."

"If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author."

"Jorge Luis Borges fantasizes about Shakespeare speaking to God: I who have been so many men in vain want to be one, to be myself. God answered him out of a whirlwind: I too am not I; I dreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your own work, and among the forms of my own dream are you, who like me are many, yet no one."

"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."

"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 yet in 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 in error, a phantom Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures."

"The Visuddhimagga (Road to Purity), illustrates the same doctrine with the same figure: Strictly speaking, the duration of the life of a living being is exceedingly brief, lasting only while a thought lasts. Just as a chariot wheel in rolling rolls only at one point of the tire, and in resting rests only at one point; in exactly the same way the life of a living being lasts only for the period of one thought (Radhakrishnan: Indian Philosophy, I, 373). Other Buddhist texts say that the world annihilates itself and reappears six thousand five hundred million times a day and that all men are an illusion, vertiginously produced by a series of momentaneous and solitary men. The being of a past moment of thought — the Road to Purity tells us — has lived, but does not live nor will it live. The being of a future moment will live, but has not lived nor does it live. The being of the present moment of thought does live, but has not lived nor will it live (op. cit., I, 407), a dictum which we may compare with the following of Plutarch (De E apud Delphos, 18): The man of yesterday has died in that of today, that of today dies in that of tomorrow."

The book qualifies this by giving everyone a perfect memory of every moment of their lives.

> I found I could recall every detail of my life; every event ever experienced I could remember with perfect clarity. I could remember every word on every page I'd ever read. Every conversation. Every tax form I'd ever filled out. I could reconstruct every second of every day I'd been alive from the moment of my birth until the day I finally shut my eyes at the end.

> This clarity of memory surprised me the first time I tried reviewing the past, but it was all there. (This was to be the greatest curse of Hell. Sometimes I would reply my entire life again and again for thousands of years. Remembering all the things I could have done differently, all the things... No. I won't go there now. I must tell this story).

Perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27950416 ?

One of my favorite things Borges does is interweave reality and fiction. For the longest time, I thought Casares was a fictional character. Nope, he’s a real person.