Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952

by Jorge Luis Borges

  Clement of Alexandria wrote about his distrust of writing at the end of the second century; the end of the fourth century saw the beginning of the mental process that would culminate, after many generations, in the pre dominance of the written word over the spoken one, of the pen over the voice. A remarkable stroke of fortune determined that a writer would establish the exact instant (and I am not exaggerating) when this vast process began. St. Augustine tells it in Book VI of the Confessions:

  When he [Ambrose] was reading, his eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent. He did not restrict access to anyone coming in, nor was it customary even for a visitor to be announced. Very often when we were there, we saw him silently reading and never otherwise. After sitting for a long time in silence (for who would dare to burden him in such intent concentration?) we used to go away. We supposed that in the hubbub of other people’s troubles, he would not want to be invited to consider another problem. We wondered if he read silently perhaps to protect himself in case he had a hearer interested and intent on the matter, to whom he might have to expound the text being read if it contained difficulties, or who might wish to debate some difficult questions. If his time were used up in that way, he would get through fewer books than he wished. Besides, the need to preserve his voice, which used easily to become hoarse, could have been a very fair reason for silent reading. Whatever motive he had for his habit, this man had a good reason for what he did.

  St. Augustine was a disciple of St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, around the year 384; thirteen years later, in Numidia, he wrote his Confessions and was still troubled by that extraordinary sight: a man in a room, with a book, reading without saying the words.41

  That man passed directly from the written symbol to intuition, omitting sound; the strange art he initiated, the art of silent reading, would lead to marvelous consequences. It would lead, many years later, to the concept of the book as an end in itself, not as a means to an end. (This mystical concept, transferred to profane literature, would produce the unique destinies of Flaubert and Mallarmé, of Henry James and James Joyce.) Superimposed on the notion of a God who speaks with men in order to command them to do something or to forbid them to do something was that of the Absolute Book, of a Sacred Scripture. For Muslims, the Koran (also called “The Book,” al-Kitab) is not merely a work of God, like men’s souls or the universe; it is one of the attributes of God, like His eternity or His rage. In chapter XIII we read that the original text, the Mother of the Book, is deposited in Heaven. Muhammad al-Ghazali, the Algazel of the scholastics, declared: “The Koran is copied in a book, is pronounced with the tongue, is remembered in the heart and, even so, continues to persist in the center of God and is not altered by its passage through written pages and human understanding.” George Sale observes that this uncreated Koran is nothing but its idea or Platonic archetype; it is likely that al-Ghazali used the idea of archetypes, communicated to Islam by the Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity and by Avicenna, to justify the notion of the Mother of the Book.

  Even more extravagant than the Muslims were the Jews. The first chapter of the Jewish Bible contains the famous sentence: “And God said, “Let there be light; and there was light”; the Kabbalists argued that the virtue of that command from the Lord came from the letters of the words. The Sepher Yetzirah (Book of the Formation), written in Syria or Palestine around the sixth century, reveals that Jehovah of the Armies, God of Israel and God Omnipotent, created the universe by means of the cardinal numbers from one to ten and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. That numbers may be instruments or elements of the Creation is the dogma of Pythagoras and Iamblichus; that letters also are is a clear indication of the new cult of writing. The second paragraph of the second chapter reads: “Twenty-two fundamental letters: God drew them, engraved them, combined them, weighed them, permutated them, and with them produced everything that is and everything that will be.” Then the book reveals which letter has power over air, and which over water, and which over fire, and which over wisdom, and which over peace, and which over grace, and which over sleep, and which over anger, and how (for example) the letter kaf, which has power over life, served to form the sun in the world, the day Wednesday in the week, and the left ear on the body.

  The Christians went even further. The thought that the divinity had written a book moved them to imagine that he had written two, and that the other one was the universe. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon declared in his Advancement of Learning that God offered us two books so that we would not fall into error: the first, the volume of the Scriptures, reveals His will; the second, the volume of the creatures, reveals His power and is the key to the former. Bacon intended much more than the making of a metaphor; he believed that the world was reducible to essential forms (temperatures, densities, weights, colors), which formed, in a limited number, an abecedarium naturae or series of letters with which the universal text is written.42 Sir Thomas Browne, around 1642, confirmed that “Thus there are two Books from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of His servant Nature, that universal and pub lick Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the Eyes of all: those that never saw Him in the one, have discover’d Him in the other” (Religio Medici I, 16). In the same paragraph we read: “In brief, all things are artificial; for Nature is the Art of God.” Two hundred years passed, and the Scot Carlyle, in various places in his books, particularly in the essay on Cagliostro, went beyond Bacon’s hypothesis; he said that universal history was a Sacred Scripture that we decipher and write uncertainly, and in which we too are written. Later, Léon Bloy would write:

  There is no human being on earth who is capable of declaring who he is. No one knows what he has come to this world to do, to what his acts, feelings, ideas correspond, or what his real name is, his imperishable Name in the registry of Light. . . . History is an immense liturgical text, where the i’s and the periods are not worth less than the versicles or whole chapters, but the importance of both is undeterminable and is profoundly hidden. (L’Ame de Napoleon, 1912)

  The world, according to Mallarmé, exists for a book; according to Bloy, we are the versicles or words or letters of a magic book, and that incessant book is the only thing in the world: or rather, it is the world.

  [1951] —Translated by Eliot Weinberger

  The Nightingale of Keats

  Those who have frequented the lyric poetry of England will not forget the “Ode to a Nightingale” that John Keats, consumptive, poor, and perhaps unfortunate in love, composed in a Hampstead garden one April night in 1819 when he was twenty-three. In the garden Keats heard the eternal nightingale of Ovid and Shakespeare and felt his own mortality, contrasting it with the delicate imperishable voice of the invisible bird. Keats had written that the poet must give poetry naturally, as the tree gives leaves; two or three hours were all he needed to produce that page of inexhaustible and insatiable beauty, which he scarcely had to touch afterward. As far as I know, its virtue has never been questioned, but its interpretation has. The crux of the problem is found in the penultimate stanza. The circumstantial and mortal man addresses the bird, “No hungry generations tread thee down,” whose voice, now, is the same heard by Roth the Moabite on the fields of Israel one ancient afternoon.

  In his monograph on Keats, published in 1887, Sidney Colvin (a correspondent and friend of Stevenson) perceived or invented a difficulty in the stanza I am speaking of. He made a curious statement that with an error of logic (which in his opinion was also a poetic fault) Keats opposed to the fugacity of human life, by which he meant the life of the individual, the permanence of the bird’s life, by which he meant the life of the species. In 1895 Bridges repeated the accusation; F. R. Leavis approved it in 1936 and added that the fallacy included in the concept naturally proved the intensity of the feeling that engendered it. In the first stanza of his poem Keats had called the nightingale a Dryad; another critic, Garrod
, quoted that epithet in all seriousness to express the opinion that the bird was immortal because it was a dryad, a divinity of the forests. Amy Lowell wrote more accurately that the reader who had a spark of imaginative or poetic sense would perceive at once that Keats did not refer to the nightingale singing at that moment, but to the species.

  Those are five opinions from five critics of the past and the present; of them all I find the dictum of the North American writer Amy Lowell the least vain; but I deny the opposition she postulated between the ephemeral nightingale of that night and the generic nightingale. I suspect that the key, the exact key to the stanza, is to be found in a metaphysical paragraph by Schopenhauer, who never read the poem.

  The “Ode to a Nightingale” was written in 1819; the second volume of The World as Will and Idea appeared in 1844. In Chapter 41 we read:

  Let us ask ourselves sincerely whether the swallow of this summer is a different one than the swallow of the first summer, and whether the miracle of bringing something forth from nothingness has really occurred millions of times between the two, to be mocked an equal number of times by absolute annihilation. Whoever hears me say that this cat playing here now is the same one that frolicked and romped in this place three hundred years ago may think of me what he will, but it is a stranger madness to imagine that he is fundamentally different.

  In other words, the individual is somehow the species, and the nightingale of Keats is also the nightingale of Ruth.

  Keats, who could write without exaggerated injustice that he knew nothing, that he had read nothing, divined the Greek spirit from the pages of a schoolboy’s dictionary; a very subtle proof of that divination or re-creation is his intuitive recognition of the Platonic nightingale in the dark nightingale of a spring evening. Keats, who was perhaps incapable of defining the word archetype, anticipated one of Schopenhauer’s theses by a quarter of a century.

  Now that one difficulty has been clarified, there is still another one, of a very different nature. Why did Garrod and Leavis and the others not find this obvious interpretation?43 Leavis was a professor at one of the colleges of Cambridge, the city that in the seventeenth century was the meeting place of the Cambridge Platonists and gave them their name; Bridges wrote a Platonic poem entitled “The Fourth Dimension”; the mere enumeration of those facts seems to aggravate the enigma. If I am not mistaken, the reason derives from something essential in the British mind.

  Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realities; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James. In the arduous schools of the Middle Ages they all invoke Aristotle, the master of human reason (Convivio, IV, 2), but the nominalists are Aristotle; the realists, Plato. The English nominalism of the fourteenth century reappears in the scrupulous English idealism of the eighteenth century; the economy of Occam’s formula, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, permits or prefigures the no less precise esse est percipi. Men, said Coleridge, are born Aristotelians or Platonists; one can state of the English mind that it was born Aristotelian. For that mind, not abstract concepts but individual ones are real; not the generic nightingale, but concrete nightingales. It is natural, it is perhaps inevitable, that in England the “Ode to a Nightingale” is not understood correctly.

  Please do not read reprobation or disdain into the foregoing words. The Englishman rejects the generic because he feels that the individual is irreducible, unassimilable, and unique. An ethical scruple, not a speculative incapacity, prevents him from trafficking in abstractions like the German. He does not understand the “Ode to a Nightingale”; that estimable incomprehension permits him to be Locke, to be Berkeley, to be Hume, and to write (around seventy years ago) the unheeded and prophetic admonitions about the individual against the State.

  In all the languages of the world the nightingale enjoys a melodious name (ruisenor, nachtigall, usignolo, for example), as if men instinctively wished the name to be not unworthy of the song that filled them with wonder. Poets have exalted it to such an extent that it has come to be a little unreal, less akin to the lark than to the angel. From the Saxon enigmas of The Exeter Book, where it is called the ancient singer of the evening that brings joy to the noblemen, to Swinburne’s tragic Atalanta, the infinite nightingale has sung in English literature. Chaucer and Shakespeare extol it, and Milton and Matthew Arnold, but we inevitably attach its image to John Keats, as we attach the tiger’s to Blake.

  The Mirror of the Enigmas

  The idea that the Sacred Scriptures have (aside from their literal value) a symbolic value is ancient and not irrational: it is found in Philo of Alexandria, in the Cabalists, in Swedenborg. Since the events related in the Scriptures are true (God is Truth, Truth cannot lie, etc.), we should admit that men, in acting out those events, blindly represent a secret drama determined and premeditated by God. Going from this to the thought that the history of the universe ― and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives ― has an incalculable, symbolical value, is a reasonable step. Many have taken that step; no one so astonishingly as Léon Bloy. (In the psychological fragments by Novalis and in that volume of Machen’s autobiography called The London Adventure there is a similar hypothesis: that the outer world ― forms, temperatures, the moon ― is a language we humans have forgotten or which we can scarcely distinguish. . . It is also declared by De Quincey:44 “Even the articulate or brutal sounds of the globe must be all so many languages and ciphers that somewhere have their corresponding keys ― have their own grammar and syntax; and thus the least things in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest.”)

  A verse from St. Paul (I Corinthians, 13:12) inspired Léon Bloy. Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate: tune autem facie ad faciem. Nunc cognosco ex parte: tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum. Torres Amat has miserably translated: “At present we do not see God except as in a mirror and beneath dark images; but later we shall see him face to face. I only know him now imperfectly; but later I shall know him in a clear vision, in the same way that I know myself.” 49 words do the work of 22; it is impossible to be more languid and verbose. Cipriano de Valera is more faithful: “Now we see in a mirror, in darkness; but later we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; but later I shall know as I am known.” Torres Amat opines that the verse refers to our vision of the divinity; Cipriano de Valera (and Léon Bloy), to our general vision of things.

  So far as I know, Bloy never gave his conjecture a definitive form. Throughout his fragmentary work (in which there abound, as everyone knows, lamentations and insults) there are different versions and facets. Here are a few that I have rescued from the clamorous pages of Le mendiant ingrat, Le Vieux de la Montagne and L’invendable. I do not believe I have exhausted them: I hope that some specialist in Léon Bloy (I am not one) may complete and rectify them.

  The first is from June 1894. I translate it as follows: “The statement by St. Paul: Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate would be a skylight through which one might submerge himself in the true Abyss, which is the soul of man. The terrifying immensity of the firmament’s abysses is an illusion, an external reflection of our own abysses, perceived ‘in a mirror.’ We should invert our eyes and practice a sublime astronomy in the infinitude of our hearts, for which God was willing to die. . . If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls.”

  The second is from November of the same year. “I recall one of my oldest ideas. The Czar is the leader and spiritual father of a hundred fifty mil
lion men. An atrocious responsibility which is only apparent. Perhaps he is not responsible to God, but rather to a few human beings. If the poor of his empire are oppressed during his reign, if immense catastrophes result from that reign, who knows if the servant charged with shining his boots is not the real and sole person guilty? In the mysterious dispositions of the Profundity, who is really Czar, who is king, who can boast of being a mere servant?”