The Blind Old Man Who Knew Nothing

I first read about him in an article by Homen Borghain, a journalist and literary figure in my language. Reading about him was fascinating, because that was the only way one was bound to feel when one read about him. For example, he applied for the post of the Librarian of the Buenos Aires Munucipal Library, and in the box for qualifications, he wrote simply a single sentence, "Throughout my life, without conscious effort, I have been gathering qualifications for this post."

He got the job!!

He applied for the job, mainly to be able to read all the books in the library. Fate played a cruel game with him and soon he would oscilalte between total blindless and partial visibility and yet he read many of the books there.

One of his most well-known and oft-mentioned statements is: "I am not sure thatI exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors . . . Perhaps I would have liked to be my father, who wrote and had the decency of not publishing. Nothing, nothing, my friend; what I have told you: I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . Can you imagine that I not even know the date of my death?"

(People who have read Marquez extensively would easily identify a phrase oft-quoted by Gabo: "I don't exist"!)

He was one of the literaty geniuses who never won the Nobel Prize. My gut feeling is that Milan Kundera will be another person of such stature never to have won it! As his eyesight kept going and coming, his writings kept becoming shorter and shorter; thus, his short-stories would end up being of a length of 30 lines.

"May nobody make light by tear or reproach

This demonstration of the mastery

Of God, who with excellent irony

Gave me at once the books and the night."

He also invented "literary forgery" where he translated non-existent books.

Jorge Luis Borges died in 1986.
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"Borges and I"

Text is from Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964), pp.246-47.

"The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page."
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Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges
http://www.themodernword.com/borges/
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/english016/borges/borges.html
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jlborges.htm