Jorge Luis Borges...

..."the other one that things happen to," arrived in Austin in September, 1961.

A readers' Borges is often like a hall of mirrors with tilting floors that cannot be escaped, that is more real than the reassuring reality outside. Here he is, in comfortingly straightforward if kabbalistic mode, on quiet virtue.

THE JUST
A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South,
a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.

(translated by Alastair Reid, quoted by Chandrahas Choudhury)

Via armavirumque

And here is what at The Chez we venerate as The Passage on The Leopard -- Inferno, I, 32

From each day's dawn to dusk each night a leopard, during the final years of the twelfth century, beheld a few boards, some vertical iron bars, shifting men and women, a thick wall, and perhaps a stone gutter stopped with dry leaves. He did not know, he could not know, that what he longed for was love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing things apart and the wind carrying the scent of a deer. But something in him was smothering and rebelling, and God spoke to him in a dream: "You live and will die in this cage so that a man known to me may look at you a predetermined number of times, and may not forget you, and may put your shape and your symbol in a poem which has its necessary place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem." God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and he understood the reasons, and accepted his destiny: but when he awoke there was only a dark resignation in him, a valiant ignorance, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of a wild beast.

It pleased Borges to add this gloss:
Years later Dante lay dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as alone as any other man. In a dream God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and his work; Dante, filled with wonder, knew at last who he was and what he was, and he blessed his bitter sufferings. Tradition has it that, on waking, he felt he had been given - and then had lost - something infinite, something he would not be able to recover, or even to glimpse, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.

--Jorge Luis Borges

Comments

[alan le map]

... perhaps you can help me locate a story, i remember a Borges quote about the boy raised in the jungle - its the story where he returns to the house of his childhood and runs in to find his knife, in its ancient hiding spot, but does not recognise his parents...

can you recommend a text to gte to know this writer - i only know snippets and have never read any 'works'

[dilys]

Hi, Alan,

Thanks for the visit.

We just wander and pick flowers among Borges, and are no experts. Have you written your question to The Garden of Forking Paths
http://www.themodernword.com/borges/
which claims to be comprehensive on all things Borges?

Good luck, and let us know what you learn.