I am not the first author of the narrative titled “The Library of Babel”; those curious to know its history and its prehistory may interrogate a certain page of Number 59 of the journal Sur, which records the heterogeneous names of Leucippis and Lasswitz, of Lewis Carroll and Aristotle.
— Jorge Luis Borges, in the Prologue to The Garden of Forking Paths.
I cannot combine certain letters as dhcmrlchtdj, which the divine Library has not already foreseen in combination, and which in one of its secret languages does not encompass some terrible meaning… To speak is to fall into tautologies.
—
Jorge Luis Borges in “The Library of Babel.”
relevant: http://jennyeagleton.tumblr.com/post/943572918/by-this-art-you-may-contemplate-the-variation-of
If a visitor from the past arrived today in our civilized societies…[he] would find a host of readers: on park benches, in the subway, on buses and trams and trains, in apartments and houses. everywhere. Our visitor could be excused if he supposed that ours was a literate society.
On the contrary. Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading — once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive — is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.
—
Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night) (via teachingliteracy) (via therewascake)
Just finished reading this.
Even such simple sentences as ‘he fell down or he picked himself up,’ you can’t do in Spanish. You have to say ‘he got up the best he could’ or some lame paraphrase.
—
You see what he’s doing there? He’s so smart like that.
Borges interviewed by Artful Dodge http://www3.wooster.edu/artfuldodge/interviews/borges.htm
I’m merely a dreamer, and then a writer, and my happiest moments are when I’m a reader.
— Jorge Luis Borges, interviewed by Daniel Bourne and Stephen Cape http://www3.wooster.edu/artfuldodge/interviews/borges.htm
When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.
— Jorge Luis Borges, interviewed by Daniel Bourne and Stephen Cape http://www3.wooster.edu/artfuldodge/interviews/borges.htm
In literary matters too, the dominant notion is that everything is the work of one single author. Books are rarely signed. The concept of plagiarism does not exist; it has been establised that all books are the work of one single writer who is timeless and anonymous. Criticism is prone to invent authors. A critic will chose two dissimilar works… and attribute them to the same writer, and then with all probity explore the psychology of this interesting homme de letres…
The books themselves are also odd… Works of natural philosophy invariably include thesis and antithesis, the strict pro and con of a theory. A book which does not include its opposite, or ‘counter-book,’ is considered incomplete.
—
Borges On the imaginary land of Uqbar in “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in Ficciones.
related in an unrelated kind of way: http://jennyeagleton.tumblr.com/post/385813159/if-we-do-not-revert-to-ascribing-meaning
To explain or to judge an event is to identify or unite it with another one.
— Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in Ficciones.
