/lit/ - Literature

Ulysses, by James Joyce

The Aleph and Other Stories, by Jorge Luis Borges

The Way of Perfection, by St. Teresa of Avila

Everyone with taste and sensibility knows to read the Norman Thomas di Giovanni translations, because Borges worked on them himself. Unfortunately his cunt of an ex-wife has caused them to go out of print, so nowadays you have to hunt on eBay or in used bookstores for copies. They are out there, though.

What do you think of this recurring theme of the infinite in Jorge Luis Borges’s work? I haven’t read all of his stuff but two major stories, “The Aleph” and “The Book of Sand” deal with this, first a narrator who discovers a sort of keyhole through which he can see all of space at the same time without obstruction, and the other deals with a narrator who finds a book that has infinite pages containing all secret knowledge. In both I find it very interesting that Borges finishes the story by having his characters giving up their “key,” the first protagonist hopes that the Aleph will be buried/destroyed when the house is bulldozed, and I believe the other hides The Book of Sand in a library. I find it interesting that Borges, an author with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the ins and outs of literature and literary history, and he would probably love to discover one of these “keys” to the infinite, but he writes characters that deem the keys too dangerous or destructive. Any other good stories like this? How do they relate to this theme? Also if anyone wants to talk about “The Aleph” that would be cool, I recently did a close rereading of it and found it fascinating. Or this could just be a thread to discuss Borges.

This infinite key theme kind of relates to the internet and Information Age in my mind as well.