BORGES: Yes. I think you should accept that.
BARNSTONE: I do accept it or I’d go mad.
BORGES: Yes, that’s it. You might even say that if you try to think, you go mad.
BARNSTONE: Yes.
BORGES: Thought should be carefully avoided, right?
BARNSTONE: Well, if you try to think why you think, you can’t think that. Yet sometimes I walk down the street and say, not who is this walking down the street, but who is this thinking he’s walking down the street, and then I’m really puzzled.
BORGES: Yes, and then you go on to thinking who is this thinking he’s thinking he’s thinking, no? I don’t think that stands for anything. That’s merely grammatical, they are only words.
BARNSTONE: It sounds like a mirror.
BORGES: You might go into a second category. You may feel a very strong physical pain. For example, you may get it through electricity or through a toothache. Then when you feel that pain, you won’t feel the pain. Then after that you say, well, this is a toothache, and then you know that you felt the pain. Then after that you might go for a third time and say, well, I knew that I knew. But after that I don’t think you can go on. You can do it successfully within the same game, because you keep on thinking the same thing over and over again. But I don’t think you could do that any more than three times over. If you say, I think that I think that I think that I think that I think that I think, all of that is quite unreal after the second term, perhaps. I read a book, by John William Dunne, Experience with Time, in which he says that since, if you know something, you know that you know it, and you know that you know that you know, and you know that you know, that you know that you know it, then there is an infinity of selves in every man. But I don’t think that can be proved.
BARNSTONE: What do you think of that momentary wakening, which is both exhilarating and frightening, of wondering how our minds happen to be thinking and talking? I always wake to the astonishment that I exist, that I am.
BORGES: When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself. So and so born in Buenos Aires in 1899, somebody who was in Geneva.
BARNSTONE: Why aren’t you the Peking Man, or someone who’s going to live five million years from now?
BORGES: Well, once I thought out a kind of fantasy, which was for literary purposes. This is that at any moment we all change into somebody else. Now, since you are changed into someone else, you are not aware of it. For example, at some moment I will be changed into you. You will be changed into me. But since the change, the shift, is complete, you have no memories, you don’t know that you are changing. You’re changing all the time, you may be the man in the moon, yet will not know about it, since, when you became the man in the moon, you became the man in the moon with his past, with his memories, with his fears, with his hopes, and so on.
BARNSTONE: The past self is obliterated.
BORGES: Yes, you may be changed into somebody else all the time and nobody would know. Maybe that kind of thing is happening. It would be meaningless, of course. It reminds me of a story, only a story, but things are only good for literary purposes! But for not too good literary purposes, for trick stories.
BARNSTONE: There is a powerful force, always in us, to move out from ourselves to reach the world. It shows itself in all ways: sexually, by writing, by talking, by touching—
BORGES: Well, living.
BARNSTONE: By living. We are only ourselves and yet there exists the strongest impulse to destroy our solitude by including more in it. Sappho has a fragment where she sums it up. She says: “I could not hope/ to touch the sky/ with my two arms.” Her thought represents that compelling life force to reach out.
BORGES: If I understand you, you say that we’re running away from ourselves all the time, and that we have to do so.
BARNSTONE: We’re trying to expand to be more, to reach, to touch outside our own circle.
BORGES: I suppose we are. But I don’t think you should worry about that. You should not feel unhappy about that. Though you know we can’t do it, or can’t do it utterly, only in an imperfect way.
BARNSTONE: We cannot do it, but part of the art of living is to go through the motions of doing it, and it makes for writing, it makes for love, it makes for all the things that bind people together.
BORGES: Since we’re given—what?—threescore years and ten, and we have to furnish them somehow, why not attempt those things? And after all, we have a life span. If not, you’d be utterly bored.
BARNSTONE: You obviously value your future work as more important than earlier achievements.
BORGES: Well, I have to.
BARNSTONE: Anything less would be fatal. Yet I’m surprised that you seem to consider your recent books of poems as less important than earlier books of poems.
BORGES: I know them only too well.
BARNSTONE: I’m convinced that your new poems are your most powerful, in both their intelligence and their passion. The latter is often expressed in a personal despair you do not allow in your stories or essays.
BORGES: No, I think that you are wrong. You think of my poems as being good. You read them through the light of the early poems, but had these poems come to your notice as being the work of an unknown poet, you’d toss them away. Don’t you think so? When you read something written by a writer whose work you know, then you read those last pieces as the last pages in a long novel, but those pages would make no sense without the pages that came before them. When you think of a poet, you always tend to think of his last poem as a fine poem, but taken by itself it may not be.
BARNSTONE: Yes, but the last poems also help the early poems because they contribute to the cumulative personality of the voice. Without those last poems your earlier poems would be heard less fully.
BORGES: Well, I suppose they are helping each other.
BARNSTONE: Because they create one total voice. When Blake says something amusing, it’s partly amusing because usually he doesn’t say anything amusing, and therefore we say: Ah, there’s Blake being witty in an epigram.
BORGES: He’s generally long-winded and ponderous!
BARNSTONE: To me your new poems are your most powerful in terms of intellect and passion.
BORGES: Let’s hope so. I don’t think of them in that way. They are mere exercises. Besides, as I feel lonely for something, I feel homesick, those poems are merely experiments in being back in Buenos Aires or in running away from things. They are merely meant to be used for padding the new book I’m writing. But I do hope you’re right.
BARNSTONE: As you stand before a mirror or record a dream in the poems, your precise delineation of pathos is a quality lost to modern poetry. It is well that you do not overesteem your recent poems, but you should know that you’re probably wrong in your judgment.
BORGES: But I hope I’m wrong! I’m glad to be convinced by you, only I can’t. I don’t want to be right. Why should I be right? Why should I insist on the fact that I’m writing very poor stuff?
BARNSTONE: Is there a poem usually lurking in your mind that you stumble on? Is it an act of recognition of a common thing, as when you suddenly remember that you love your mother or father? Is it that you fall upon a poem, or does the poem fall on you?
BORGES: I would say the poem falls on me, and even more in the case of a short story. Then I am possessed. Then I have to get rid of it, and the only way to get rid of it is to write it down. There is no other way of doing so, or else it keeps on.
BARNSTONE: You say your poems are mere exercises, but what are they exercises in?
BORGES: I suppose they are exercises in language. They are exercises in the Spanish language, in the euphony of verse, exercises in rhyming also. Since I’m not too good a rhymer, I try to get away with it. And they are also exercises in imagination. In the case of a story, I know that I must think out a story, clearly and coherently, and then I can write it down. If not, I can’t. If not, the whole thing would be a jumble of words. It should be more th
an that. A story should mean not only the words but something behind the words. I remember reading—maybe it was one of Stevenson’s essays: “What is a character in a book? A character in a book is merely a string of words,” he said. Now, I think that’s wrong. He may be a string of words, but he should not leave us the impression of being a string of words. Because when we think of Macbeth or Lord Jim or Captain Ahab, we think of those characters as existing beyond the written words. We are not told everything about them, but there are many things that have happened to them that surely existed. For example, we are told about a character doing such and such a thing. Then the next day he does another thing. Now, the writer doesn’t say anything about it. We feel that he had his nights of sleep, that he has had his dreams, that things happened to him that we are not being told about. We think of Don Quixote as having been a child, though there is not a word concerning Don Quixote’s childhood in the book, as far as I remember. So the character should be more than a string of words. And if he is not more than words, he would not be a real character. You wouldn’t be interested in him. Even in the case of a character who exists, let’s say, within ten lines: “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well, Horatio.” That character exists by himself. Yet he only exists as a string of words within ten lines, or perhaps even less.
BARNSTONE: And in someone else’s mouth. He never even presents himself on stage.
BORGES: Yes, in someone else’s mouth, and yet you think of him as having been a real man.
BARNSTONE: And feel compassion for him.
BORGES: And feel compassion for him. Shakespeare had Hamlet in a graveyard. He thought that making him handle a skull, a white skull—Hamlet was in black—all that would have made a quite effective picture. But since he couldn’t be holding the skull and not saying a word, he had to say something. And so, Yorick came into being through that technical necessity of Shakespeare’s. And he came into being forever. In that sense Yorick is far more than a string of words. I suppose Stevenson knew all that, since he was a writer, since he created many characters, and those characters were far more than a string of words.
BARNSTONE: And in ten words he outsmarts time forever.
BORGES: Yes, that’s very strange, eh?
BARNSTONE: I have a very personal question.
BORGES: The only interesting questions are personal questions. Not those of the future of the Republic, the future of America, the future of the cosmos! These things are meaningless.
BARNSTONE: I think these questions have all been rather personal.
BORGES: They should be personal.
BARNSTONE: Do you have paternal feelings toward your friends? Or is this word paternal completely irrelevant?
BORGES: No, they’re not paternal…
BARNSTONE: Everyone is an equal?
BORGES: Brotherly, fraternal, rather than paternal. Of course being an old man I’m expected to be paternal, but really I’m not. Now, Macedonio Fernández thought that paternal feelings were wrong. He said to me: “What do I have in common with my son? We belong to different generations. I’m fond of him, but that’s my mistake. He’s fond of me, that’s his mistake. We shouldn’t really care for each other.” Then I said to him: Yes, that doesn’t depend on the rule. You may care for him in spite of those arguments. And suppose that your arguments are made because you think that you are worrying too much over him, or you feel that you haven’t done right by him. There’s quite a lot of nonsense about fathers not being allowed to love their sons and sons not being allowed to love their fathers.
BARNSTONE: Go on.
BORGES: Of course he had abandoned his family. There’s a very obvious explanation: the fact that he had left them to live his own life.
BARNSTONE: To go from fathers to reverie, you speak much of dream. What do you mean by dream? How is a dream different from any other state of wakefulness?
BORGES: Because a dream is a creation. Of course wakefulness may be a creation: part of our solipsism and so on. But you don’t think of it in that way. In the case of a dream, you know that all that comes from yourself, whereas, in the case of a waking experience, many things may come to you that don’t come out of yourself, unless you believe in solipsism. Then you are the dreamer all the time, whether waking or sleeping. I don’t believe in solipsism. I don’t suppose anybody really does. The essential difference between the waking experience and the sleeping or dreaming experience must lie in the fact that the dreaming experience is something that can be begotten by you, created by you, evolved out of you.
BARNSTONE: But not necessarily in sleep.
BORGES: No, no, not necessarily in sleep. When you’re thinking out a poem, there is little difference between the fact of being asleep and that of being awake, no? And so they stand for the same thing. If you’re thinking, if you’re inventing, or if you’re dreaming, then the dream may correspond to vision or to sleep. That hardly matters.
BARNSTONE: Like all of us, you are a selfish man. You have dwelled on yourself, have explored and exploited your own mind, and have transmitted your observations to others.
BORGES: Well, what else can I do? I shouldn’t be blamed, I shouldn’t be held to blame for that.
BARNSTONE: Because you have transmitted your self-observations to others, you are surely not selfless. Yet the fact of giving your work to others, as you also offer a kind of Socratic conversation to others, is an act of generosity of a curiously rare ethical breed.
BORGES: I think I need it, because I’m enjoying it also.
BARNSTONE: Yet I fear that this breed of ethical generosity is becoming extinct and that one like you, protected by blindness and loyalty to earlier authors, may not appear again. Then I worry a bit more and become optimistic and think that this ethical man and artist will occur again.
BORGES: He or she will be lost forever and ever!
BARNSTONE: Are you an ethical man?
BORGES: Yes, I am essentially ethical. I always think of things in terms of right and wrong. I think that many people in my country, for example, have little feeling for ethics. I suppose in America people are more ethical than in my country. People here, for example, generally think of a thing as being right or wrong, the war in Viet Nam, and so on. But in my country you think of something as being profitable or unprofitable. That may be the difference. But here Puritanism, Protestantism, all that makes for ethical considerations, while the Catholic religion makes for pomp and circumstance only, that is, for essential atheism.
BARNSTONE: There’s a lot of fun in you, Borges. You’re very childlike, you enjoy things, you have a tremendous humor.
BORGES: Well, I should, after all. I wonder if I’m really grown up. I don’t suppose anybody is.
BARNSTONE: No, none of us is. When I was unhappy in the past, in love, some foolish things like that—
BORGES: No, not foolish. Those things are a part of every human experience. I mean the fact of loving and not being loved, that is a part of every biography, no? But if you came to me and said: I am in love with so-and-so, she’s rejected me. I think that every human being can say that. Everyone has been rejected, and has rejected also. Both things stand out in everyone’s life. Someone is turning down someone or being turned down. It’s happening all the time. Of course when it happens to us, as Heine said, then we’re very unhappy.
BARNSTONE: Sometimes when I was unhappy I wanted to die, but I knew that this was just a sign that I wanted to live.
BORGES: I have thought of suicide many times, but I’ve always put it off. I say, why should I worry, since I have that very powerful weapon, suicide, and at the same time I never used it, at least I don’t think I ever used it!
BARNSTONE: Well, you’ve almost answered my question. I wanted to say that the thought of suicide was merely a sign of wanting to live, that even the false suicide I often conceived was a desperate wish to live, more fully, better.
BORGES: When people think of suicide, they only think of what people will think about them knowing that they committed su
icide. So in a sense they go on living. They do it out of revenge, generally speaking. Many people commit suicide because they are angry. It is a way of showing their anger and revenge. To make someone else guilty for what you do, which is remarkably wrong.
BARNSTONE: Suicide is largely a young man’s romance, a false door young people sometimes step into. But what about the converse? Why the passion to live? Why that passion that drives the young to death and the writer to his pen? Why the consuming passion to live?
BORGES: If I could answer that, I could explain the riddle of the universe, and I don’t think I can, no? Since everybody else has failed. I’ve known many suicides. Many of my friends have committed suicide. In fact, among literary men in my country, suicide is fairly common, perhaps more than in this country. But I think that most of them have done it out of a desire to spite somebody, to make somebody guilty of their own death. In most cases that is the motivation. In the case of Leopoldo Lugones, I think he was trying to turn somebody else into a murderer.
BARNSTONE: Sometimes there’s a weariness, a desire to be released, when people are very sick.
BORGES: Of course there’s another kind of suicide. When a friend of mine knew he had a cancer, he committed suicide, which was a reasonable thing to do. I wouldn’t hold that against anybody. I think that it was right.
BARNSTONE: I don’t have any more questions unless you have a question you’d like to ask me.
BORGES: No, I would like to thank you for your kindness and for this very pleasant conversation, because I thought of it as an ordeal, and it hasn’t been an ordeal. On the contrary, it has been a very pleasant experience. You were very generous to be feeding me, giving me your own thoughts, pretending that I really thought them out. You’ve done everything, been handling me very deftly all the time, and I’m very grateful to you. Thank you, Barnstone.
BARNSTONE: Thank you, Borges.
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It Came Like a Slow Summer Twilight
Borges at Eighty: Conversations Page 4
