Borges on books and change
I’m reading this book of short essays by Jorge Luis Borges that were originally part of a lecture series he gave in Buenos Aires in 1977. Here’s a wonderful excerpt:
Emerson said that a library is a magic chamber in which there are many enchanted spirits. They wake when we call them. When the book lies unopened, it is literally, geometrically, a volume, a thing among things. When we open it, when the book surrenders itself to the reader, the aesthetic event occurs. And even for the same reader the same book changes, for we change; we are the river of Heraclitus, who said that the man of yesterday is not the man of today, who will not be the man of tomorrow. We change incessantly, and each reading of a book, each rereading, each memory of the rereading, reinvents the text. The text too is the changing river of Heraclitus.
I admit to a love of libraries myself.
The internet may be the future with libraries becoming obsolete, but in my mind nothing really compares with an actual, physical book.
Interestingly enough, the book that I guess most fascinated me growing up was a very, very old family bible my grandmother had.
If I remember it correctly, it was probably from the mid-1800’s perhaps, it had both the old and new testaments, as well as apocrypha, family births/deaths, and a very thick leather cover that had been tooled or something.
The most fascinating thing were the numerous illustrations inside. I think they may have been by Dore or some similar illustrator?
Not saying I took every lesson intended by the contents to heart (!), but it was a fascinating book for a 10 or 12 year old to be looking through.
Panta rhei…
Jamie Irons
I read Borges in college and loved his short stories, many of which have themes similar to this. I do wonder if his engaging writing makes him more persuasive than he deserves, though. We tend to read comments like this as if he is saying there is an ongoing deepening and modification of meaning. But he often goes well beyond that into suggesting that meaning is forever unstable, with previous understandings destroyed or invalid.
Thank you for that wonderful Borges’ excerpt!
(I do not really know Borges, having only recently read his short story “The Immortal”.)
But isn’t it amazing how thinking — a lightening bolt of consciousness — can speak so personally to nameless others, far removed in time, space, and culture?
The best that has been thought and said is in the public domain, available to all, and yet we are admonished to “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.” Who would have thought that the divine spoke in the resigned voice of worldly wisdom?
Life is problematic — yes — why do we not partake of all this goodness?
Related — Seed this everywhere, folks: Bill Whittle and Declaration Entertainment, a grassroots, citizen-produced movie studio that is striking a blow in the Culture Wars for our civilization.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gJGUSHXBgo&feature=player_embedded
Hearts and minds, people; hearts and minds.
I’m reading ‘Ficciones’ in an effort to advance my Spanish. I think I’d rather be reading Don Colacho’s Aphorisms…in English.
Pichard de Bury, Philobiblon, Ch, XV.
My first non-adapted, “adult” book was “20 Thousand Miles Under Sea” by Jule Verne in Russian translation. It was printed in 1890, in old leather cover, and beatifully illustrated by estampes, probably, reprinted from original French edition. I remember how I read it aloud in kindergarten, surrounded by other boys and girls, who listen to my reading with a great interest. Our nurses were happy that they did not need to watch children playing while I read; I was 6 years old and earned a nickname “snotty professor” because of my chronic running nose and didactic tone, picked up from my mother, an English teacher. I do not remember anything from this book now except illustrations.
I wonder if Terry Pratchett, creator of the Discworld stories read that essay a long time ago.
He had a lot of fun with the library at Unseen University, where wizards are educated.
Among other things he wrote that magical books cannot be filed by subject. Their contents, the spells, are so powerful that shelving them together would result in a Critical Black Mass.
He also wrote that books were a state of matter which existed seperately from liquid, solid, or gas. They exerted an influence on the shape of space and time so that every library that ever exist was linked to every other.
One thing leads to another, as Charlie Brown (I believe) once said in Peanuts: “The cosmic implications are staggering…”
The great thing about great books is that they can be read over and over, and each time they yield new insights. They seem to change to educate each reader, no matter where he or she is in life. I just learned that Walker Percy, the novelist, read Brothers Karamazov six times.
May I ask what everyone is re-reading?
I found it best to have a wide ranging reading habit: one never knows when an idea or statement found in an out of the way book may resolve a problem in an unrelated field. Picasso once responded to a question regarding what should an artist do when he cannot do art: he respondedIntellect; in the same book, I found a short quote from Aristotle on from: every thing snapped together in a instant.
Glitch in loading. Should have read:
I found it best to have a wide ranging reading habit: one never knows when an idea or statement found in an out of the way book may resolve a problem in an unrelated field. Picasso once responded to a question regarding what should an artist do when he cannot do art: he respondedIntellect; in the same book, I found a short quote from Aristotle on from: every thing snapped together in a instant.
Okay, there is a complete damn glitch somewhere.
Glitch in loading. Should have read:
I found it best to have a wide ranging reading habit: one never knows when an idea or statement found in an out of the way book may resolve a problem in an unrelated field. Picasso once responded to a question regarding what should an artist do when he cannot do art: he responded “Read.”
As an artist, the master artist I honed myself against was Cezanne; not only did I seek to understand what he was doing without replicating him; I also sought to understand his comment “Art is intellect.” I saw this as the golden key. After nearly twenty years, I found the answer in Mortimer Adler’s book Intellect; in the same book, I found a short quote from Aristotle on from: every thing snapped together in a instant.
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