Infinity according to Jorge Luis Borges Ilan Stavans
When Ireneo Funes looked at a glass of
wine on a table,
he saw “all the shoots, clusters, and
grapes of the vine.
He remembered the shapes of the clouds
in the south
at the dawn of the 30th of April of 1882,
and he could compare them in his
recollection with the marbled grain
in the design of a leather-bound book
which he had seen only once,
and with the lines in the spray
which an oar raised
in the Rio Negro on the eve of the
battle of the Quebrancho.”
In the short story “Funes, the Memorious,”
Jorge Luis Borges explores what it would
be like to have a perfect memory.
His character not only remembers
everything he has ever seen,
but every time he has seen
it in perfect detail.
These details are so overwhelming
Funes has to spend his days
in a dark room,
and can only sleep by imagining a part
of town he has never visited.
According to Borges,
Funes’s memories even rendered him
incapable of real thought,
because “To think is to forget a
difference, to generalize, to abstract.
In the overly replete world of Funes
there were nothing but details.”
Funes’ limitless memory was just one
of Borges’s many explorations of infinity.
Born in Argentina in 1899,
he admired the revolutionaries
of his mother’s family
but took after his father’s bookish clan.
His body of essays, poems, and stories,
or, as he called them, ficciones
pioneered the literary style of
“lo real maravilloso,”
known in English as Magical Realism—
and each was just a few pages long.
Though Borges was not interested in
writing long books,
he was an avid reader,
recruiting friends to read to him
after he went blind in middle age.
He said his image of paradise was an
infinite library,
an idea he brought to life in
“The library of Babel.”
Built out of countless identical rooms,
each containing the same number of
books of the same length,
the library of babel is its own universe.
It contains every possible
variation of text,
so there are some profound books,
but also countless tomes
of complete gibberish.
The narrator has spent his entire life
wandering this vast labyrinth
of information
in a possibly futile search for meaning.
Labyrinths appeared over and over
in Borges’ work.
In “The Garden of Forking Paths,”
as Yu Tsun winds his way through
country roads,
he remembers a lost labyrinth
built by one of his ancestors.
Over the course of the story,
he finds out the labyrinth is not a
physical maze but a novel.
And this novel reveals that the real
Garden of Forking Paths is time:
in every instant, there are infinite
possible courses of action.
And as one moment follows another,
each possibility begets another
set of divergent futures.
Borges laid out infinite expanses of time
in his labyrinths,
but he also explored the idea of
condensing all of time
into a single moment.
In “The God’s Script,”
at the very beginning of the world
the god writes exactly one message
into the spots of the jaguars,
who then “love and reproduce without end,
in caverns, in cane fields, on islands,
in order that the last men
might receive it.”
The last man turns out to be a tenacious
old priest
who spends years memorizing and
deciphering the jaguar’s spots,
culminating in an epiphany where he
finally understands the god’s message.
Imprisoned deep underground,
he has no one to share this meaning with,
and it changes nothing
about his circumstances,
but he doesn’t mind:
in that one moment,
he has experienced all the experience of
everyone who has ever existed.
Reading Borges, you might catch
a glimpse of infinity too.