denshi's Journal: Jorge Luis Borges

Borges is a great comfort to me in times of confusion. It is in no way on-topic, or affirmational, or in any way connected to the normal definitions of 'comfort'. I can't even read Latin or Greek. But two things bring joy to me: 1) his style of prose reminds me that some people still learn for the joy of learning, to pull apart the fibers of the tapestries of their lives, and 2) his plot constructions yield a very strange sense of choice and fate.

His fictions depict characters who could do nothing but what their being drove them towards. "The Circular Ruins" enclose one man driven on a quest to dream another man, dream him whole, and set him free on the earth. We find at the end that his motive is set because, without his knowing, he himself was dreamed by another. "Death and the Compass" follows a detective whose investigation of a spree of murders both drives and solves the spree - he himself is both questioner and answerer, or perhaps just question and answer. "The Theologians" watches two mediaeval monks, opponents and competitors in doctrinal study, who over the course of their work establish themselves as symmetric: the neither would exist, in current form, without the other. Each was himself in order that the other could be himself.

Some of his fictions are not character driven, but they are nonetheless imbued with a driving pattern. "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" asks a question of the world: if all fiction had to have been written. "Lottery of Babylon" is a chronology of a lottery that grows to encompass nonmonetary, and eventually ecclesiastical, powers; in eventuality it becomes a religion whose one heresy is that all chance is not planned in advance by the secret Company which runs the lottery.

His poetry, and essays on history and literature are more complex and open-ended, set as they are in a less mutable world. But again we see Borges reach into the scene and trace a structure, a connection; a connection much more suprising and perverse than any found in a survey history text. (and has not all brilliance some element of perversity?)

I am intentionally simplifying Borges' works. Each of his stories has much more interesting, unique concepts, simply couched in the framework I have described above. I know that none of this is literally relevant to our lives. We have total choice in our dealings, we can be anything we want. But we have choice in interpretation, and a world of mathematic description, one whose past, present, and future come together in a cohesive whole, is intensely useful in the infinite Now, where we construct these patterns to give motive to our daily activities.

I wholeheartedly agree

[MarkusQ]

I am, as a background task, attempting to learn Spanish, and one of the things I am trying is to read/translate some of his stories from Spanish into English, using a dictionary and (as a last resort) a published English translation of the same story. It is slow going, but I enjoy his writing enough that I find it a rewarding passtime.

I don't know yet how much it will improve my Spanish.

-- MarkusQ

Re:I wholeheartedly agree

[denshi]

That sounds like an absurdly difficult task, considering how he jumps back and forth between (I think) 5 languages, with frequently 3 in one story. Any successes so far?

Re:I wholeheartedly agree

[MarkusQ]

That sounds like an absurdly difficult task, considering how he jumps back and forth between (I think) 5 languages, with frequently 3 in one story. Any successes so far?

Depends on how you define success. I think it takes me about twenty minutes a page, but I may be significantly off due to the absorbtion factor. I don't really know how much I'm learning. I do know that it's a heck of a lot of fun--more fun, for example, than crossword puzzles, freecell, etc. (But then, since my other waiting-for-my-wife diversions include number theory, group theory, and learning odd programming languages, my definition of "fun" may be suspect.)

-- MarkusQ

Comfort

[Fiver-rah]

I actually just started reading Borges a week or so ago. It was recommended by a friend I made a couple months ago who has (so far) had excellent taste in almost everything. Based on my initial assessment, which is at this point a handful of short stories, I have to agree with what you say. He's brilliant, and perverse, and incredibly well-read.

In some ways, reading Borges reminds me of reading Hesse. I think I must have read almost everything Hesse ever wrote (it's much better in German). He's also got a style of writing which kind of makes you feel a "strange sense of choice and fate." Particularly in books like "Das Glasperlenspiel". From what little I can tell, though, Borges is a little more thoughtful than Hesse.

But I don't think I find either Hesse or Borges comforting. Actually, I find them both subtly disturbing (but not in a bad way). I don't know what this says about me, but my comfort books don't tend to be quite so metaphysical. "Watership Down" by Douglas Adams (obviously, hence the nickname). "Bridge of Birds" by Barry Hughart. "Pride and Prejudice". Bujold's "A Civil Campaign"--which is the perfect love story. "Animal Dreams" by Barbara Kingsolver. "The Diamond Age" by Neil Stephenson.

Yeah. Those are books that I've probably read at least ten times a piece (in some instances, like ACC and P&P, probably close to 20). Very different from Borges. Maybe we mean a different thing by comfort.

Re:Comfort

[denshi]

I haven't read too much Hesse. Mostly because my German comprehension is almost nil, but mostly because after "Beneath the Wheel", I determined that reading Hesse was redundant, as he simply echoed what was found in my personal journal.

Pride & Prejudice is fun, but I can't really call it comforting (the BBC adaptation? maybe...). It's too simple -- she overcomes misinformation, he learns how kindness coexists with propriety, several happy couples result. Borges is more impenetrable, much like my own life. "The Diamond Age" has some props, but I am perpetually annoyed by Stephenson's choice of the most over-the-top socio-political landscapes to place his worlds in. Maybe placing characters in something approximating reality is why Cryptonomicon is his best work.

Haven't read the others. I'll have to rectify that.

The remainder of my comfort books are more mainstream: Hugo's "Les Miserables" for sacrifice, the Herbert Mason verse translation of "Gilgamesh" for grief, Carl Sagan's "Contact", William Gibson's "Neuromancer" for everything at once, Ursula K. McGuin's "A Wizard of Earthsea", Yukito Kishiro's "Gunmu".

Best find over the last year or so has been Haruki Murakami's "Dance Dance Dance".

I'm not sure what the above means by comfort. I think I'd define it as trying to reconnect when I'm detached. You?

Re:Comfort

[Fiver-rah]

I haven't enjoyed Hesse that much since I was 18 or so. Since then, I've become disenchanted with his method of problem solving. All his books have very similar themes. Main character has problem, although great societal status is achieved, person feels (lonely/incomplete/unhappy) with life. Eventual solution is found by ditching everything and running away. Eventually I decided that running away is a good way to ditch a terrible situation, but really doesn't solve more difficult problems, like dealing with a world which is inherently messy, chaotic, and suboptimal.

I agree that Cryptonomicon is clearly Stephenson's best work. However, I enjoy the Diamond Age more because Nell kicks so much butt. For me it's comforting because even though Nell is emotionally fucked up, she's also not about to let it stop her from doing anything, and she doesn't. Crytonomicon is technically superior because he has a tendency for his novels to devolve into confusing violence, leaving me staring blankly at the last five pages saying, "Huh? Huh? What just happened?" The better the book, the shorter the period of confusion at the end. Cryptonomicon didn't descend into weirdness. But there wasn't a character in C. that I liked as much as Nell.

The books I read for "comfort" and the books I most love aren't always synonymous. Pride and Prejudice *is* too simplistic. It's a "happily ever after" with some witty yet understated dialogue. Sometimes I like that, when my life is too complicated and my personal script writer has been putting idiocies in my mouth. How nice it would be to live in a time when all a girl had to worry about was getting married, and then you lived happiliy ever after (in truth, it wouldn't have been nice at all--but one doesn't think that while reading the book).

But Bujold is just fantastic, always. If you haven't read "The Mountains of Mourning" (the novella linked in my sig) you should try it on for size. "A Civil Campaign" comes several books down a long story line, and the experience is really much richer for having read the others. My favorite Bujold, though, is "Memory"--not a comfortable book, to be sure, but one which always leaves me feeling somewhat cleaner at the end.

I liked "The Tombs of Atuan" better than "A Wizard of Earthsea". And for some reason, reading "Tehanu" really upset me. I've probably only read Les Mis three times, so that doesn't quite count as comfort reading. I've only read bits of Gilgamesh, and never anything by Murakami, although I'm always on the lookout for something new and good to read.

I'm going to be glib and say that for me, comfort is trying to disconnect when I'm too attached. Of course this means nothing if I don't specify what I'm trying to disconnect from. It's not really that I'd prefer to disconnect from reality (whatever that is). But I have a tendency to get into intellectual circles, where I keep telling myself the same things over and over again. This is true both scientifically and personally. When I want comfort, I want something to put in the forefront of my mind which disrupts me and pulls me out of the rut that I've managed to dig for myself. When I'm really upset about something, I have a tendency to read a combination of trash (shitty sci-fi, fantasy, or romance) and books I've read on the order of ten times or more. This fills the forefront of my brain but leaves my backbrain open to plug away at the problem. It's like dreaming when you're awake.

Re:Comfort

[denshi]

Pride & Prejudice *does* have a few good lines. I shudder to think that many women are still deriving formative impressions from a Victorian lifelong celibate, but I do like Elizabeth mulling over Darcy with: "I shall then give over every expectation, every wish of his constancy. If he is satisfied with only regretting me, when he might have obtained my affections and hand, I shall soon cease to regret him at all."

I agree with your Stephenson critique. But I sort of try to avoid books that are driven by characters that are too easily subjective. I prefer, well, I don't have an excellent example near to hand, but I do have 'The Sun Also Rises' on my desk, and that has the quality that I identify partially with each character, instead of playing out the story behind one voice.

Murakami's "Dance Dance Dance" is a neat book. The narrative begins and ends at the same physical place, with much plot in between. Some people learn, some people end up dead, the protagonist sees mystical things no one else can see. I like how when it's put all together, the protagonist is living through an adventure, but no one else has record of it, or can even understand. So he has this almost secret life that is not only unverifiable, but perhaps verification is simply irrelevant: the important part is what he learned, was able to love again, all that jazz; the how didn't really matter. I'm trying to find more in that vein.

Gilgamesh opens on:

"This is the story of a man

who loved
and lost
a friend to death.
And learned he had not
the power to bring him back to life.
It is the story of Gilgamesh,
and his friend Enkidu.

Gilgamesh was half a man, half a god.
Enkidu was half a man, half an animal.
This is the story of their becoming
human, together."

And doesn't slow down from there. Oldest tale on record, still useful now.

I really like Les Mis. It's a great escape book, depicting a one-dimensional world where self sacrifice is all you need in life, instead of the real world, where such a policy is just as isolationist and empty as any other constraint on the self.

Immersive reading *is* a wonderful distraction to give your less vocal mental elements control of a problem for a while. For that effort, I more often go work out until I can't see straight. It's like being unconcious while, uh, unconcious.

Re:Comfort

[shimmin]

For my comfort reading, I typically go for love stories, but ones of a rather different nature than Jane Austen. Right now, the three favorites in my bookpile are Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the time of Cholera (OK -- I'm a sucker for unrequited love, but this book paints characters so much larger than life that you want to be them in spite of it being an incredibly sad story), Jose Saramago's Baltasar and Blimunda (which manages to say more about the title characters' relationship in whole chapters devoted to the construction of the abbey of Mafra and other royal follies than in the scattered paragraphs that deal with them directly), and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (psychoanalyze at will...).

Whose translation of Gilgamesh is that? I haven't seen anything that clean before?

Re:Comfort

[StandardDeviant]

FWIW, when I'm feeling down or lost I tend to read The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay. I guess you could say that Houston is a rhodesian copper mine to me. If you haven't read the book, you might like it... Ping me about it and I'll bring it along to lend to you the next time I'm in austin (which may be this friday).