LITERATURE: Ficciones – Tlon, etc.

This one will definitely be re-read, likely when I finish the rest of the stories in this book. 

Borges would be someone I would definitely love to sit and spend a few hours with.  That is, if he spoke English because my Spanish has been all but forgotten (another one of those things to do–brush up on it).  And too, if he were still alive.  But maybe he is; or never was.

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a very strange little story and one that is ripe with metaphor–if you wish.  Borges leaves much up to the reader, incites him to take the text and run away with imagination. The denouement is not that at all, but instead poses a bigger question: has our history been written by men who tell truth or lies? The narrator himself is in the process of rewriting.  He hints that things that exist now will not, but rather be transformed into a Tlon-like planet with language and science so changed as to be unrecognizable.  But then, who would care, since readers in the future would read and believe what is written and that becomes the new truth.

I think I’m in love again with Borges.  If when I cease to exist here or in fact never did, I will hope there is another plane, another time and space where he is accessible, maybe lives down the street, two houses away, and would join me in an aperitif and some talk.