• TTLY…: Vintage posts.

Borges was an inventor of Guys. And Things. Very interesting Guys and Things, who we’ve cribbed and fobbed from like the classics of old. Not great big quaffing passages have we stolen, but little slivers, sips of sentences; thought experiments, and suchlike.

Like that one gif of Danny DeVito: oh my god. I get it. Read Borges’ protagonists, and, as I did, you might think, “they’re all very cerebral, I’m not half sure what the fuck they’re talking about, but it’s an interesting ride.”

But Borges’ Guys and Things don’t come into their own solely on the page. It’s the afterimages they leave behind. These are philosophical tales as much as they are magical realism. Like the sorcerer in ‘The Circular Ruins,’ the reward’s in thinking through what these interesting Guys and Things actually mean¹. They stick around, and soon, become the sort of ideas lying around that beg to be adapted, remixed, stolen. Them’s good storytellin’.

Maybe that’s one reason why Borges’ tales, puzzling and riddlesome though they are at times, have become classics. He just seems to have this way of writing passages that reify those mercurial threads of thought we have, when we’re trying to string a tangible point together. We’re not quite sure what it means, yet, but if we just keep focusing on it… aaaaaaaand it’s gone. Maybe it’s gone forever, or maybe we need to keep engaging the text to find it again.

Because no, I haven’t fully comprehended the ten tales compiled for the Penguin Clothbound Classics edition of Borges. But I’m sure as hell coming back for more.

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1. You’d think that’s the default process of reading, that none of us have to be told, but sometimes, when the flow state starts, it’s very difficult to stop and think through passages as they happen to you. ↩︎

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TTLY… (permalink)

[May 14] Fool Me Twice, We Don’t- Err, What Was That First Thing You Said? https://brologue.net/2024/05/14/fool-me-twice-we-dont-err-what-was-that-first-thing-you-said/