There is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe

Borges- The Aleph

This section was incredible. I'm not absolutely sure, but I'm guessing that The Aleph was put out as a collection of short stories far before it was compiled into this bigger collection. It seems as though these short stories must certainly have been written within a few years of each other or at least in the same decade or period for Borges. The obvious or underlying theme of each one has something to do with infinity, circular time, duality(of all sorts), mazes, mirrors, perception, the universe, the land, dreams, religion, the meaning of God. Some stories have even more specific ties- tigers are important symbols in both The Zahir and The Writing of the God. While in The Zahir, the tiger is said to have been the zahir and one point and caused men to "forget the universe." In The Writing of God, the mystery of the universe, of God, is written in the tiger's spots. The tiger can both torment a man's soul and lead him to God. He ends The Zahir, "perhaps behind the coin (the zahir) is God."

I also noticed that the number 14 was mentioned in at least two of the stories, and when it was, was synonymous with infinity. I tried to research this but came up empty-handed. It seems that this is another one of Borges constructions.

Other themes or points

• the transformation of man... the idea that there is one exact moment in a man's life that tells him who he is.

• everything is everything else and one in the same, and nothing at all:

"There are an infinite number of things upon the earth; any one of them can be compared to any other." (240)

"The house is as big as the world- or rather, it is the world."(221)

"I am god, hero, philosopher, demon, and world- which is a long-winded way of saying that I am not."(191)

• Aristotle vs. Plato

• memory and forgetting

• Qu'ran's two faces(duality)

• tigers are also part of Deutsches Requiem and Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth

• labyrinths

• blurred lines between life and death and dreams and the relationship of each to the other

• identity

• what God can and cannot do

• destiny, reincarnation, existence

Borges- Ficciones

The Garden of Forking Paths...
I love the way the first few stories in this section are constructed almost in the way Vonnegut constructs his novels- by creating made-up religions and different conditions of reality or unreality. The idea that without thinking about it we expect even fictional stories to adhere to or be based on our excepted and understood truths or environment is something I'd never really thought about. Borges explains his method best in the forward:

"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books- setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them."

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius reminds me so much of House of Leaves( a novel written around a novel that does not exist but is quoted from and references a great number of other books that do not exist) or Tolkien. It's interesting that the story ends with Borges commenting that the ideas and even objects of Tlon are becoming so accepted and integrated into the world of his story that eventually people will not know what history is truth and what history has been made up. Which I think could possibly refer to our acceptance of things like religious histories and ideologies as truth.

The extent to which Borges constructs a language and culture for the people of Tlon complete with epistemological and metaphysical theories is ridiculous and almost unbelievable. The solid paragraphs of made-up information and facts would be overwhelming if they weren't perfectly balanced by and suspended among these dazzling weightless descriptions or observations. His ability to write a sentence that embeds itself in my head so beautifully or resonates so incredibly with me reminds me of Marquez or Camus- it is incredibly dense but feels so personal.

*I'm sorry if this isn't the most coherent. I'm nursing a mean cold and my brain is fuzzy. I'll try to add to it, but I wanted to get something down before class.