1
Jorge Luis Borges
Borges and I
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen
to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a
moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an
entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate. I know of Borges
from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a
biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteencentury typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of
Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that
turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an
exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship. I live,
let myself go on living. so that Borges may contrive his
literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort
for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but
those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs
to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to
tradition. Besides I am destined to perish, definitively, and
only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by
little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite
aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying
things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their
being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone, and the tiger a
tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true
that I am someone), but I recognize myself les in his books than
in many others or in the laborious strum“Borges and ,I by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James E. Irby, from
Labyrinths; Selected Stories and Other Writings, edited by Donald A.
Yates and James E. Irby. Copyright © 1962 by New Directions Publishing
Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions, New York.
Borges and I
20
ming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went
from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and
infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to
imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything
and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.
Reflections
Jorge Luis Borges, the great ArgentinIan writer, has a deserved
international reputation, which creates a curious effect. Borges
seems to himself to be two people, the public personage and the
private person. His fame magnifies the effect, but we all can
share the feeling, as he knows. You read your name on a list, or
see a candid photograph of yourself, or overhear others talking
about someone and suddenly realize it is you. Your mind must
leap from a third-person perspective -- “he” or “she” – to a
first-person perspective – “I.” Comedians have long known how to
exaggerate this leap: the classic “double-take” in which say,
Bob Hope reads in the morning newspaper that Bob Hope is wanted
by the police, casually comments on this fact, and then jumps up
in alarm: “That’s me!”
While Robert Burns may be right that it is a gift to see
ourselves as others see us, it is not a condition to which we
could or should aspire at all times. In fact, several
philosophers have recently presented brilliant arguments to show
that there are two fundamentally and irreducibly different ways
of thinking for ourselves. (See “Further Reading” for the
details.) The arguments are quite technical, but the issues are
fascinating and can be vividly illustrated.
Pete is waiting in line to pay for an item in a department
store, and he notices that there is a closed-circuit television
monitor over the counter – one of the store’s measures against
shoplifters. As watches the jostling crowd of people on the
monitor, he realizes that the person on the left side of the
screen in the overcoat carrying the large paper bag is having
his pocket picked by the person behind him. Then, as he raises
his hand to his mouth in astonishment, he notices that the
victim’s hand is moving to his mouth in just the same way. Pete
suddenly realizes
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that he is the person whose pocket is being picked! This
dramatic shift is a discovery; Pete comes to know something he
didn’t know a moment before, and of course it is important.
Without the capacity to entertain the sorts of thoughts that now
galvanize him into defensive action, he would hardly be capable
of action at all. But before the shift, he wasn’t entirely
ignorant, of course; he was thinking about “the person in the
overcoat” and seeing that the person was being robbed, and since
the person in the overcoat is himself, he was thinking about
himself. But he wasn’t thinking about himself as himself; he
wasn’t thinking about himself “in the right way.”
For another example, imagine someone reading a book in
which a descriptive noun phrase of, say, three dozen words in
the first sentence of a paragraph portrays an unnamed person of
initially indeterminate sex who is performing an everyday
activity. The reader of that book, on reading the given phrase,
obediently manufactures in his or her mind’s eye a simple,
rather vague mental image of a person involved in some mundane
activity. In the next few sentences, as more detail is added to
the description, the reader’s mental image of the whole scenario
comes into a little sharper focus. Ten at a certain moment,
after the description has gotten quite specific, something
suddenly “clicks,” and the reader gets an eerie sense that he or
she is the very person being described! “How stupid of me not to
recognize earlier that I was reading about myself!” the reader
muses, feeling a little sheepish, but also quite tickled. You
can probably imagine such a thing happening, but to help you
imagine it more clearly, just suppose that the
book involved
was The Mind’s I. There now – doesn’t your mental image of the
whole scenario come into a little sharper focus? Doesn’t it all
suddenly “click”? What page did you imagine the reader as
reading? What paragraph? What thoughts might have crossed the
reader’s mind? If the reader were a real person, what might he
or she be doing right now?
It is not easy to describe something of such special selfrepresentation. Suppose a computer is programmed to control the
locomotion and behavious of a robot to which it is attached by
radio links. (The famous “Shakey” at SRI International in
California was so controlled.) The computer contains a
representation of the robot and its environment, and as the
robot moves around, the representation changes accordingly. This
permits the computer program to control the robot’s activities
with the aid of up-to-date information about the robot’s “body”
and the environment it finds itself in. Now suppose the computer
represents the robot as located in the middle of an empty room,
and suppose you are
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Asked to “translate into English” the computer’s internal
representation. Should it be “It (or he or Shakey) is in the
centre of an empty room” or “I am in the centre of an empty
room”? This question resurfaces in a different guise in Part IV
of this book.
D.C.D.
D.R.H.