Ficciones

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There are many men adept in those diverse disciplines, but few capable of imagination- fewer will capable of subordinating imagination to rigorous and systematic plan. Their language, with its derivatives ― religion, literature, and metaphysics ― presupposes idealism. A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary.

In “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” the conceptual aspects of this tale don’t override the compelling plot, and this was one of the stories I really loved. Perhaps, someone opened it, hoping for something worth more than a book; its general shape could have been a DVD or a video game.All at once, George panics; for a moment he considers giving me the book to free himself from my haunting, but instead he flees. Ficciones is an imaginarium; it is a weird and haunted carnival of games and sideshows come to life. Ahh yes, who hasn’t lent a book to a saucy literary woman or a handsome poetic man with the hopes of words shared easing the assault on their virtue. Or indeed the 'story' might not 'begin' at all leaving the narrative to continue in the mode of an essay. Borges often uses numbers, shapes, places and compass points in his stories, and that numerical, spatial, geometrical and temporal data, combined with uncertainty about whether the 'facts' are historical or fictional, made me feel as if the ground was shifting beneath my feet, as in the twelfth story, Death and the Compass: …the second crime occurred on the night of the third of January.

For him, I think, it was the mind-bending absurdity of the questions he posed rather than some metaphysical (and unattainable) truth of the matter that excited him. What genre could encapsulate the breadth of this gem, which has been shining through the vagaries and austerity of time and space, of literature?The rule, clearly, for readers and especially collectors is to never lend a book that you expect to get back. There is a person in Borges’s universe who may reconstruct every dream, every day dream he had ever had. These universes are built upon various possibilities of a tussle between chance and self -determinism. As a first-time Borges reader I hoped and even expected that Kerrigan’s introduction would yield some nugget of advice, a clue into how to approach Borges’ chef d’oeuvre. I thought that perhaps I just wasn't in the proper state of mind, or perhaps wasn't well read enough to get it.

For the next twenty minutes he pads about his home barefooted, touching the counters, the walls, straightening the picture frames; he goes about ensuring that he is real, and he is not in some labyrinth, or trapped in a world of mirrors, a world with Fate, no Fate, a world of wizards, city bombings, a world where some men don’t exist at all. They have become essential in the history of Western thought, and he will have had the chance to know them during his lifetime. While I remember distinctly the circumstances that made me fall in love with each of my favorite books, their significance at different points in my life (and the reason why I will not reread them - they belong to my past), my memory fails me about what exactly attracted me to Borges’ writing except that it had a spell on me. fact checking sites are once again refuting claims that 98 million Americans got cancer from the polio vaccine.There is a library (or universe itself) which contains all possible books of entire universe or rather multiverses in it; all books, however different from one another they might be, consist of identical elements: the space, the period, the comma and letters of alphabet; so the library has all the possible combinations of all letters of the alphabet. The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" originally appeared published in A History of Eternity ( Historia de la eternidad) (1936). As I began each new story, I never knew where it was going to be situated, south or north, west or east.