#Jorge Luis Borges Aleph

[albannikolaiherbst]

Miniaturen (Poetik zur Musik)

[Bild Putten mit Lyra (Laeishalle) ©: → Ajepbah / Wikimedia Commons]            In das Zentrum eines Festivals Miniaturen zu stellen, ist mehr als nur Programm. Es ist programmatische Metaphysik. Denn das Kleinste trennt vom Allen, vom All, oft kaum eine hauchdünne Wand. So erzählt Jorge Luis Borges von einem „regenbogenfarbenen Kreis von fast unerträglicher Leuchtkraft (…) und…

[the-reading-diaries]

11.09.24

Starting the day with Borges

[noosphe-re]

One day or one night—between my days and nights, what difference can there be?—I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I woke up and there were two grains of sand. Again I slept; I dreamed that now there were three. Thus the grains of sand multiplied, little by little, until they filled the cell and I was dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a vast effort I woke myself. But waking up was useless—I was suffocated by the countless sand. Someone said to me: You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Writing of the God, The Aleph, translated by Andrew Hurley

[litsnaps]

[lascitasdelashoras]

Jorge Luis Borges - Manuscrito de El Aleph

[date-prisa-estamos-leyendo]

Mañana, cuando el reloj de la prisión dé las nueve, yo habré entrado en la muerte; es natural que piense en mis mayores, ya que tan cerca estoy de su sombra, ya que de algún modo soy ellos.

El Aleph, Jorge Luis Borges.

[croomfolk]

The Aleph Fanart inspired by Jorge Luis Borges's short story with the same name. Ink, scanned and coloured digitally. "[...] I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth [...]"

[bracketsoffear]

El Aleph (the Aleph) (Jorge Luis Borges) "In Borges' story, the Aleph is a point in space that contains all other points. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping, or confusion."

Night Watch (James Inglis) "Concerns an interstellar probe which is still functional when our Galaxy is dying. The story ends with the community of probes launched by various races and drawn together by the fact that very few stars are still shining, setting out on the long voyage to a distant and still-young galaxy as the last star of our galaxy burns out behind them."

[leitoracomcompanhia]

“...vi numa gaveta da escrivaninha (e a letra me fez tremer) cartas obscenas, inacreditáveis, precisas, que Beatriz dirigira a Carlos Argentino...”

Jorge Luis Borges, “O Aleph”;pintura de Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts.

[mxwhore]

this book is rewiring my brain

[miladythewinter]

Review of The Aleph and Other Stories by J. L. Borges (i read in portuguese)

I loved this! This book contains a series of independent short stories but, as you go on reading, you realize that they're actually interconnected. Not because they share the same plot or characters but because they share the same themes: time, memory, the cycles of history and man, the universe, dreams, identity and fate. They also sometimes share the same elements, objects or things, such as big felines (tiger, jaguar, lion), numbers (14 and 19) and labyrinths. Another interesting aspect is the inclusion, a couple of times, of Borges as a character, something that blends reality and fiction, as do many of the stories likewise.

The placement of the stories is also intriguing and clever because the gradual realization that the stories share elements and topics makes the book build like a crescendo, with the all-encompassing title story actually being the last. This aspect - with the next story almost picking up a thread from the previous one and so forth, in a sort of chain - reminded me of If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Calvino.

To conclude, Borges' other works - including Fictions - have definitely jumped to the top of my to-read list for sure.

[quotessentially]

From Jorge Luis Borges’s The Aleph

[bishopsbox]

La candente mañana de febrero en que Beatriz Viterbo murió, después de una imperiosa agonía que no se rebajó un solo instante ni al sentimentalismo ni al miedo, noté que las carteleras de fierro de la Plaza Constitución habían renovado no sé qué aviso de cigarrillos rubios; el hecho me dolió, pues comprendí que el incesante y vasto universo ya se apartaba de ella y que ese cambio era el primero de una serie infinita.

Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph (comienzo), 1943

[spaceintruderdetector]

https://archive.org/details/BorgesObrasCompletasBorges/Borges-Obras-Completas-Borges/mode/2up

[whilereadingandwalking]

My read of The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley, was technically a reread, but I had forgotten much more about these stories than about the ones in Ficciones, and so the collection contained more surprises, which was fun to dig into. 

I carried this book with me to see the penguins (it's a Penguin Modern Classic, so that was fun), and read most of it in Tierra del Fuego national park, finishing it in a dark moody bar in Buenos Aires that I think Borges would have really liked. The poor book is completely beat up, particularly because I had to shove it into a sweatshirt pocket when it started raining during our penguin visit.

I really enjoyed many of the stories from "The Aleph" (1949), including "The Immortal," in which Borges thinks about what it would look like for people to really be able to live forever, and "The Zabir," in which a mysterious object stalks a man. 

And since I wrote my thesis on Borges, "The Maker" (1960) holds a lot of gems. In its small vignettes and tales, Borges writes in his spiderweb-y, twisting way about what it means to create and try to write something into existence, whether it's possible to reproduce something that exists in the world, of legacy and immortality through writing. 

It was fascinating good stuff, and again—I could write another three theses on this man's work! But I promise you don't have to be in that frame of mind to enjoy his weird little tales—you can also just dig in, and muse, and wonder, and enjoy.

Content warnings for sexual assault, mental illness, gaslighting, violence, false accusations.

[erick-saqui]

Miro mi cara en el espejo para saber quién soy, para saber cómo me portaré dentro de unas horas, cuando me enfrente con el fin. Mi carne puede tener miedo; yo, no.

—Jorge Luis Borges, Deutsches requiem.