Borges at Eighty: Conversations

by Jorge Luis Borges

  OCLANDER: Borges, since you are talking about your house, you are from some place and you’ve traveled everywhere.

  BORGES: No, no. Not everywhere. I hope to go to China and to India. I was already there since I’ve read Kipling and the Tao Te Ching.

  OCLANDER: Perhaps you could take us where most of us have never been, or will be, where you grew up, in the old Buenos Aires, the streets of Buenos Aires and its history.

  BORGES: Really I saw very little of it. I was born in a rather slummy side of the town called Palermo, but it never interested me. I was interested in Palermo in the year ’29 or so. But as a boy, my memories are memories of the books I read. Those are far more real to me than the place itself. So that my memories are really memories of Stevenson, of Kipling, and of the Arabian Nights, and of Don Quixote (I began reading it as a boy, and have gone on reading it, especially the second part, the best I should say. The first part may safely be omitted, perhaps, except for the first chapter, which is really wonderful.) So what can I say about my childhood? But little. I remember pictures of my forefathers, I remember swords that have done service—in what you call the winning of the West and we called La conquista del desierto, the conquest of the desert. My grandfather fought the red Indians, or the pampas Indians as we call them—Los indios pampas. But I have but few personal memories of that time. My memory is chiefly of books. In fact, I hardly remember my own life. I can give you no dates. I know that I have traveled in some seventeen or eighteen countries, but I can’t tell you the order of my travels. I can’t tell you how long I was in one place or another. The whole thing is a jumble of division, of images. So that it seems that we are falling back on books. That happens when people speak to me. I always fall back on books, on quotations. I remember that Emerson, one of my heroes, warned us against that. He said: “Let us take care. Life itself may become a long quotation.”

  BARNSTONE: I would like to ask you about hell.

  BORGES: I know it only too well.

  BARNSTONE: What is hell? Is doomsday now, at every second? Is it something you find in a nightmare? What does hell mean to you, Borges?

  BORGES: Firstly, I’m very glad that my friend has mentioned nightmare, since a nightmare is different from all other dreams. I have read many books on dreams, volumes of psychology, but I have never found anything interesting on nightmares. And yet the nightmare is different from other dreams. The name itself is interesting. I think that etymologically the nightmare may bear two meanings. The nightmare may be the fable of the night. You have the German word Märchen akin to it. Or it may be the demon of the night or it may be, for all we know, a mare. I think Shakespeare speaks of the nightmare, of the nightfold, and Hugo had surely read that because in one of his books—I greatly love Hugo—he speaks of ie chevai noir de la nuit “the black horse of night,” and that of course stands for nightmare. Now, I think the great difference between everyday misfortune and nightmare is that nightmare has a different taste to it. I have been unhappy many times over. Everybody has. I never had the nightmare feeling except when I had the actual nightmare. And we might think—why not? everything is allowed today, and here we are among friends and, though this is very sad to say, I must be sincere to you—that the nightmare is a proof of the existence of hell. In nightmare we feel a very special kind of horror, not felt in any other way as far as I’m aware. Unhappily, I know nightmares only too well, and they have been very helpful to literature. I remember the splendid nightmares—were they dreams or were they inventions? It’s all the same—the splendid nightmares of De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Also there are many tales of Edgar Allan Poe. You may find that such and such a sentence is wrong or we dislike such and such a metaphor, but they are really nightmares. And of course, in the case of the works of Kafka, you get nightmares also. So as to hell, it may be possible, there may be a state somewhere where all things are nightmare. Let us hope not, since the taste for nightmare is sufficient. It is as keen as physical pain and as unbearable.

  As to hell, I suppose hell is not a place. People may think it is because of reading Dante, but I think of it as a state. And I remember part of a verse from Milton, where Satan says: “Myself am Hell.” And I was translating, with María Kodama, Angelus Silesius’ Cherubinischer Wandersmann and we came to the same statement that if a soul is damned it is forever in hell. There is no use in finding its way to heaven. And the great Swedish mystic Swedenborg thought much the same way. The damned are unhappy in hell but would be far unhappier in heaven. And if you want the whole philosophy of Swedenborg in a nutshell, you can find it in the second act of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, where the name of Swedenborg is not mentioned, but the whole scheme of heaven and hell is given as being, not a reward or a punishment, but as a state of the soul. A soul finds its way into hell or heaven, or rather becomes hell or heaven through itself. And I find at the close of every day—I’m eighty years old—I am living moments of felicity—that may be heaven—and moments of unhappiness which we might, by a not too exaggerated metaphor, call hell.

  OCLANDER: Borges, you once said that it is the privilege of the blind to see. You have talked about Manhattan, and I think there is an entire part of our audience which has never seen the people and cultures of America…

  BORGES: There are so many peoples here, and so different

  OCLANDER: Would it be possible for you to talk to us about the United States and the differences in its peoples and its cultures?

  BORGES: A very large question. I’m afraid I’m not qualified to answer it. But I can say that I have a very friendly memory of Texas, especially of Austin. I discovered America via Texas in 1961, with my mother, who died at the age of ninety-nine some four or five years ago. I love the South, but since I’ve mentioned all those writers, I also love the East, and if I think of the Midwest I have to think in terms of Carl Sandburg. I also love him. But the great American poet of this century is Robert Frost. That’s the name I would choose. But really I don’t think I love things “against” each other. I love all countries and all the writers I have read (and there are many I have never read who are still shedding an influence on me), and I am a disciple of the past, of the whole past. I don’t believe in schools. I don’t believe in chronology. I don’t believe in dating writings. I think poetry should be anonymous. For example, if I could choose I would like a line of mine, a story of mine, rewritten and bettered by somebody else, to survive, and I would wish my personal name to be forgotten, as in due time it will. That happens to all writers. What do we know of the names of the men who wrote that splendid dream, the Arabian Nights? We don’t and we don’t care. What do we know of the private life of Shakespeare? We know nothing and we don’t care, since he turned that private life into Macbeth, Hamlet, into the sonnets. Those sonnets are enigmas of course. Swinburne spoke of the sonnets as “those divine and dangerous documents.” That’s a fine sentence. I wonder whether it’s true or not. I think in the case of an author the best thing is to be a part of tradition, to be a part of a language, since the language goes on and the books may be forgotten, or perhaps every age rewrites the same books over and over again, changing or adding a few circumstances. Perhaps the eternal books are all the same books. We are always rewriting what the ancients wrote, and that should prove sufficient.

  As to me, personally, I have no ambition. I think that I am a mistake, that people have made too much of me. I am a greatly overrated writer. At the same time I am grateful to you all for taking me seriously. I don’t.

  BARNSTONE: After hell, by the same reasoning, could you tell us about heaven?

  BORGES: I read a book written by an English clergyman saying that there is much sorrow in heaven. I believe so. And I hope so. For, after all, joy is unbearable. We can be happy during a moment or so, but an eternity of happiness is unthinkable. But personally I disbelieve in an afterlife. I hope I shall cease. When I feel sorry, when I am worried—and I am being worried all the time—I say to myself: Why worry when a
t any moment salvation may come in the shape of annihilation, of death? Since I am about to die, since I may die at any moment, why worry about things? What I am looking for is not utter blackness, for blackness is something after all. No, what I want is to be forgotten—and of course I’ll be forgotten. Everything will be forgotten in due time.

  OCLANDER: Today you were saying that the hardest voyage of all is the voyage which is about to come, that anticipation is the hardest thing of all. Would you comment?

  BORGES: I wonder if I ever said that. What I said was that expecting things was awful. But when things came, the present becomes the past quite soon. It slips into the past. I read a very fine book by Bradley. The book is called Appearance and Reality and therein he speaks of time as a river. Well, of course, Heraclitus and all that, Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, and so on. Bradley thought of time as flowing towards us from the future. We are always swimming against the current. And the moment when the future turns into or melts into the past, this is the present moment. The present is a moment when the future becomes the past. I underwent a very severe and painful operation some six months ago. I stood in fear of it. Then I told myself, this fear, this anticipation, three more days and three more nights to come, all this is part of the operation itself. And then I felt quite lucky about it.

  BARNSTONE: You’ve been immersed in the writings of the gnostics, the mystics, in the Kabbalah, the Book of Splendor.

  BORGES: I’ve done my best, but I am very ignorant.

  BARNSTONE: You have been interested in the mystics—

  BORGES: At the same time I am no mystic myself.

  BARNSTONE: I imagine that you would consider the voyage of the mystics a true experience but a secular one. Could you comment on the mystical experience in other writing, in Fray Luis de León …

  BORGES: I wonder if Fray Luis de León had any mystical experience. I should say not. When I talk of mystics, I think of Swedenborg, Angelus Silesius, and the Persians also. Not the Spaniards. I don’t think they had any mystical experiences.

  BARNSTONE: John of the Cross?

  BORGES: I think that Saint John of the Cross was following the pattern of the Song of Songs. And that’s that. I suppose he never had any actual experience. In my life I only had two mystical experiences and I can’t tell them because what happened is not to be put into words, since words, after all, stand for a shared experience. And if you have not had the experience you can’t share it—as if you were to talk about the taste of coffee and had never tried coffee. Twice in my life I had a feeling, a feeling rather agreeable than otherwise. It was astonishing, astounding. I was overwhelmed, taken aback. I had the feeling of living not in time but outside time. I don’t know how long that feeling lasted, since I was outside time. It may have been a minute or so, it may have been longer. But I know that I had that feeling in Buenos Aires, twice in my life. Once I had it on the south side, near the railroad station Constitución. Somehow the feeling came over me that I was living beyond time, and I did my best to capture it, but it came and went. I wrote poems about it, but they are normal poems and do not tell the experience. I cannot tell it to you, since I cannot retell it to myself, but I had that experience, and I had it twice over, and maybe it will be granted me to have it one more time before I die.

  OCLANDER: Why do you want to travel to China? What do you hope to find there?

  BORGES: I feel in a way that I have always been in China. I felt that when I read Herbert Allan Giles’ History of Chinese Literature. Then I have read and reread many translations of the Tao Te Ching. I think the finest one is by Arthur Waley, but I have also read the Wilhelm one and the French translation, and there have been many Spanish translations. Besides, as I spent a month in Japan, in Japan you feel the tutelar ghost of China all the time. This has nothing to do with politics. It has nothing to do with the fact that Japanese culture is a culture of its own. In Japan people feel China the way we feel Greece. Of course I know I shall never know Chinese, but shall go on reading translations. I read The Dream of the Red Chamber. I wonder if you have read it. I have read it in the English and the German translation, but I know that there is a far vaster, and perhaps the strictest, translation into French. The Dream of the Red Chamber. The book, I assure you, is as good as its title.

  BARNSTONE: Please take us back into the island of consciousness, to the source of words, thought and sensations, and tell us what happens there before language, before the words have been minted by Borges.

  BORGES: I think I can say that writing poetry or writing fables—it all boils down to the same thing—is a process beyond one’s will. I have never attempted a subject. I have never looked for a subject. I allow subjects to look for me, and then walking down the street, going from one room to another of my house, the small house of a blind man, I feel that something is about to happen, and that something may be a line or it may be some kind of shape. We may take the metaphor of an island. I see two tips. And those tips are the beginning of a poem, the beginning of a fable, and the end. And that’s that. And I have to invent, I have to manufacture, what comes in between. That is left to me. What the muse, or the Holy Ghost, to use a finer and a darker name, gives me is the end and the beginning of a story or of a poem. And then I have to fill it in. I may take the wrong path and have to retrace my steps. I have to invent something else. But I always know the beginning and the end. That is my personal experience.

  I suppose that every poet has his own method, and there are writers, I am told, who know only the beginning, and they go on, and near the end they discover or they invent—the two words mean the same thing—the ending. But in my case I must know the beginning and the end. And I do my best not to allow my opinions to intrude on what I write. I am not thinking of the moral of the fable but of the fable. Opinions come and go, politics come and go, my personal opinions are changing all the time. But when I write I try to be faithful to the dream, to be true to the dream. That’s all I can say. And when I began writing, I wrote in a very baroque style. I did my best to be Sir Thomas Browne or to be Góngora or to be Lugones or to be somebody else. Then I was trying to cheat the reader all the time, always using archaisms or novelties or neologisms. But now I try to write very simple words. I try to avoid, what is called in English, hard words or dictionary words. I do my best to avoid them. And I think that my best book of short stories is the last one I wrote, El libro de arena, The Book of Sand, and there I think there is not a single word that may detain the reader or hinder him. The stories are told in a very plain way, though the stories themselves are not plain, since there are no plain things in the universe, since everything is complex. I disguise them as simple stories. In fact, I write, I rewrite them some nine or ten times, and then I want to have the feeling that the whole thing has been done in a rather careless way. I try to be as ordinary as possible. If you don’t know my books, there are two books I venture to recommend to your attention. They will take you an hour or so, and that’s that. One, a book of poems, called Historia de la luna, History of the Moon,* and the other, El libro de arena, The Book of Sand. As for the rest, you can very easily forget them, and I will be very grateful to you if you do, since I have forgotten them.

  BARNSTONE: Death is a marker of time. We have two deaths: before our birth and then after our life is done. These are the public deaths, but perhaps the real personal death is the one we live daily, which we imagine…

  BORGES: You remember Saint Paul: “I die daily.”

  BARNSTONE: Death is only something we can perceive now. The mystics speak of death-in-life as an experience outside time. How do you perceive it?

  BORGES: I think that one is dying all the time. Every time we are not feeling something, discovering something, when we are merely repeating something mechanically. At that moment you are dead. Life may come at any moment also. If you take a single day, therein you find many deaths, I suppose, and many births also. But I try not to be dead. I try to be curious concerning things, and now I am receiving experiences
all the time, and those experiences will be changed into poems, into short stories, into fables. I am receiving them all the time, though I know that many of the things I do and things I say are mechanical, that is to say, they belong to death rather than to life.

  OCLANDER: I would like you to take us on a trip to someplace you have not been.

  BORGES: I should say that that one place is the past, because it is very difficult to change the present. The present has something hard and rigid about it. But as to the past, we are changing it all the time. Every time we remember something, we slightly alter our memory. And I think we should be grateful to the whole past, to the history of mankind, to all the books, to all the memories, since, after all, the only thing we have is the past, and the past is an act of faith. For example I say “I was born in Buenos Aires in 1899.” Now that’s an act of faith. I can’t really remember that. Had my parents told me “You were born in the third century in Timbuktu,” I would have believed them of course. But I stick to that fact since I supposed they were not lying to me. So that when I say I was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 I’m really committing an act of faith.

  To go back to the past, the past is our treasure. It is the only thing we have, and it is at our disposal. We can change it, think of historical characters as being different, and what is very fine is the fact that the past is compounded not only of things that happened but of things that were dreams. I should say that Macbeth is as much a person of the past and to us a person of the present as, let us say, Charles of Sweden, Julius Caesar, or Bolívar. We have the books, and those books are really dreams, and every time we reread a book that book is slightly different and we are slightly different also. So I think we can fall back safely on that vast emporium, the past. I hope I shall keep on finding my way into it, and add into it my physical experience of life.