Recommended Reads: Jorge Luis Borges’ “Other Inquisitions”

This past week my wife Nancy mentioned that Pope Francis and I have something in common. Naturally I was thinking of the all-too-obvious humble piety connection that everyone would notice between he and I. “No,” she said, “sorry. Pope Francis stated in an interview that two of his favorite authors were Dostoevsky and Borges.” Neither of these authors surprises me as being special for Pope Francis. Dostoevsky remains important to most believers (and many non), and Borges is Argentine, as is Pope Francis. Being the most admired author from his native country it really makes sense…though Ernesto Sabato would reject this assumption.

The Brothers Karamazov remains my most treasured reading experience…but second to this would be Other Inquisitions by Jorge Luis Borges. Published in 1952, it was not widely read in English until 1964. Borges is world famous for his mysterious labyrinthine short stories. He was also a poet and a writer of essays. Other Inquisitions is a collection of his essays from 1937-1952.

Like T. S. Eliot, Borges published many of his essays before his more famous poetry and short fiction. Both writers used published essays to prepare a reading public to comprehend (at least to be prepared for) the work to follow. His essays read like his short stories; they are packed with complex circular associations.

Borges was remarkable for his erudition. He had few peers who could keep pace with his prodigious memory. Borges appeared to have read everything from obscure Icelandic sagas to Arab poets to Egyptian mystics, to modern authors like Chesterton, Faulkner, Joyce and Paul Valery.

These essays cover topics such as metaphysics, dreams, absolute languages, the age of the earth, time, and history, and of course the power and meaning of Art. One of his most celebrated essays is “A New Refutation of Time.” It is the longest and most complex essay in the book…notice the irony of the title? Read it again.

“The Wall and The Books” is a highly anthologized essay where Borges reflects upon the Chinese Emperor Shih Huang Ti, who both constructed the Great Wall and decreed that all the books of the empire be destroyed; he wanted history to begin with him. Borges was most gifted with his ability to see metaphors. He made brilliant connections. He asks in this essay what symmetry there might be between an Emperor walling in an empire, while at the same time decreeing that this most ancient and historically sensitive of people eradicate their past. To Borges there was some meaning there. He concludes this essay with a sentence found frequently among those who search for definitions of things ineffable like beauty and art: “Music, state of happiness, mythology, faces shaped by time, certain twilights and certain places, try to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have lost, or want to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation, which does not occur, is, perhaps, the esthetic phenomenon.” Yes that sense of something just about to become clear and yet…and yet…

The first time I read this I knew I had encountered something special. Right there was succinctly stated that truth about what I felt when I looked at Vermeer’s Girl With A Pearl Ear Ring or read the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, or lost myself in the final movement of Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde.”

Borges had given this experience a form for which I had no words.

Each essay is a work of art. Each a careful and complex luminous mediation upon persons and ideas: Pascal, Zeno’s Paradox, The Partial Enchantments of the Quixote, The dream of Coleridge, the mystery of the authorship of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

While running from the Burning-House-of-literature (I owe this description to Billy Collins) this would be the second book I would grab. Borges rewards re-reading. Although his writing is short, it is dense and you end up re-reading them enough to feel in retrospect that these short works are among the longest ever written.

In the epilogue Borges muses about his collection and states that he notices certain elements to be a feature of all the essays. The first is his tendency to weigh philosophical and theological ideas in terms of their aesthetic worth, “…what is singular and marvelous,” and the observation that the number of metaphors possible for the human mind is limited, but like the apostle can be all things to all people.

Borges has, more than any writer, been my most formative influence. His desire to see and live a life aesthetically has sustained me during many a dark time in my life. Borges believed that reading was an act of art- no less important than the act of writing (and by extension listening and looking). Borges established the post-modern idea of how we as readers create new works each time we experience them.  Every reader makes new connections and continues the creative process. He elevates reading. In one of his most celebrated essays he discusses Kafka and his influence. He refers to them as both precursors and also writers on whom he had influence. One of these is Pascal. Every college graduate should perk up at such an assertion. How indeed can a writer of the 20th century have had any influence upon a writer of the 17th century? How indeed. Borges notes that it took Kafka for us to connect the dots- to detect a common theme. It was in one sense not there until Kafka revealed it to us…hidden in plain sight. The existential thread that leads us through the author of Ecclesiastes to Lucretius to Augustine to Pascal to Kafka is imaginatively engendered by the “active artist reader”. None was ever so engaged as Jorge Luis Borges.

I like a Pope who reads Borges. The leader of the Catholic Church keenly understands that the great skeptic Borges can in his own circuitous pattern ultimately restore us to our Faith, an irony thick and no doubt satisfactory to Borges (who died in 1986). Some would say that there is no way he can enjoy something since he is dead. Readers of Borges know “not so fast”.

One final point: Borges, who remembered and read more than almost any person in the 20th century, who could quote indexes from memory and spoke when he met Anthony Burgess in “Old English”, who could recite Shakespeare and Quevedo and had nearly the entire Comedia of Dante committed to memory…was blind from the mid 1950 until his death some 36 years later. Blind.

It beggars the mind.