Jorge Luis Borges belongs to the latter — a blind librarian who saw infinity in a chessboard, a man who wrote essays disguised as fiction and fiction disguised as footnotes. But more than anything, Borges wrote about immortality — not as a blessing, but as a beautiful, terrifying labyrinth.
There are writers you read to learn a story. Then there are writers you read to unlearn time. the immortal borges
To read Borges is to enter a hall of mirrors. You think you’re reading about a Chinese emperor’s map, or a library of hexagonal rooms, or a man who dreams another man — but really, you’re reading about reading. About the shimmering impossibility of a final page. Jorge Luis Borges belongs to the latter —
To be immortal is to be bored of every sunrise. To forget your mother’s voice. To watch cities crumble into sand and feel nothing. Then there are writers you read to unlearn time
Not because he believed in an afterlife. He was famously skeptical. (“I am not an atheist,” he once said, “I am an agnostic. I am a man of doubt.”) No, Borges is immortal in the way a mirror is: he doesn’t die; he multiplies.
In his story “The Immortal” (from The Aleph ), Borges tells of a Roman soldier who drinks from a cursed river and stops dying. He wanders the earth for centuries, forgetting his own name, living among primitive troglodytes — only to realize, eventually, that those grunting creatures are the immortals. They have no need for language, for memory, for love. Why write a poem when you have forever to write all poems? Why love one person when you can outlast every face?