I like when I get the chance to do this. I read something a long time ago which I forgot about, then remembered, then forgot, then tried to remember and couldn't, but then I had a dream I was recommending books to people last night and it came back to me again. I wish I had more dreams of recommending books; people like myself forget a lot of what they read and wish they didn't. There are some people, though few, who forget very little of what they read. This involves one of the most famous of these, one Jorge Luis Borges, author of an essential fraction of the most beautiful stuff ever laid down.
Long ago I picked up a book of his called Atlas, which appears to be about his reflections on pretty much whatever comes up, which are always interesting because of their sheer depth. It was in this book that something was revealed to me, something that I needed spelled out, which looking back on it I could have assumed long before. I never dared question the man's mind. With his encyclopedic mastery of all literature, he's an intimidating guy and I thought he ought to be left alone, not drawn into my mind's whirlpool of celebrity personalities with their tacky problems and preferences and mood swings, and everything else like that. Borges was always my stoic bird. But sadly, we are all people, and people have to have feelings. This book was written when Borges was blind.
The Islands of Tigre
No other city I know borders on a secret archipelago of green islands which recede and disappear into the equivocal waters of a river so slow that literature has called it immobile. On one of these islands, one I've never seen, Leopoldo Lugones killed himself. He may have felt, perhaps for the first time in his life, that he was freeing himself, at last, of the mysterious duty of searching out metaphors, adjectives and verbs for everything in the world.
Many years ago, El Tigre supplied me images, probably all erroneous, to illustrate the Malay and African passages in Conrad's stories. These images will serve to erect a monument, doubtless less durable than the bronze of certain infinite Sundays. I recall Horace, who continues to be for me the most mysterious of poets, inasmuch as his stanzas cease but do not conclude, and thus are unconnected. It is not unlikely that his classical mind deliberately abstained from emphasis. I reread the above and confirm the fact --with a certain bittersweet melancholy-- that everything in the world brings me back to a quotation or a book.
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