Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

some quite short pieces; I’ve written two sonnets, not too good ones, and then a poem about a friend who had promised us a picture. He died. He’s a well-known Argentine painter, Larco, and then I thought of the picture he had promised us, promised my wife and me—I met him in the street—and then I thought that in a sense he had given us a picture because he had intended to do so, and so the picture was in some mystic way or other with us, except that the picture was perhaps a richer picture because it was a picture that kept growing and changing with time and we could imagine it in many different ways, and then in the end I thanked him for that unceasing, shifting picture, saying that, of course, he wouldn’t find any place on the four walls of a room, but still he’d be there with us. That was more or less the plot of the poem. I wrote that in a kind of prose poem.
    BURGIN: That’s very nice.
    BORGES: Well, I wander. Now, when I was in New York, I began writing a poem and then I realized it was the same poem I had written to my friend all over again, yes, because it was snowing and we were on the, I don’t know, sixteenth floor of one of those New York towers, and then I lay there, it was snowing very hard, we were practically snowed in, snowbound, because we couldn’t walk, and then I felt that somehow the mere fact of being in the heart of New York and of knowing that all those complex and beautiful buildings were around us, that mere fact made us see them and possess them better than if we had been gaping at shop windows or other sights, no? It’s the same idea, of course. And suddenly I realized that I’d been going over the same ground, the idea of having something because you don’t have it or because you have it in a more abstract way.
    BURGIN: This seems to be the type of feeling one gets from a story like “The Circular Ruins.” Can you tell me what the pattern was behind the story?
    BORGES: No. I can’t say much about the conception, but I can tell you that when I wrote that story the writing took me a week. I went to my regular business. I went to—I was working at a very small and rather shabby public library in Buenos Aires, in a very grey and featureless street. I had to go there every day and work six hours, and then sometimes I would meet my friends, we would go and see a film, or I would have dinner with somebody, but all the time I felt that life was unreal. What was really near to me was that story I was writing. That’s the only time in my life I’ve had that feeling, so that story must have meant something—to me.
    BURGIN: Have you ever read any poetry by Wallace Stevens?
    BORGES: I seem to recall the name in some anthology. Why? Is there something akin to it?
    BURGIN: I think he believes a lot in the integrity of the dreamer, in the integrity of the life of the imagination as opposed to the physical universe.
    BORGES: Yes, well, but I don’t think that feeling got into the story, it was merely a kind of intensity I had. That story came from the sentence “And I let off dreaming about you”—in
Alice in Wonderland
.
    BURGIN: You like
Alice in Wonderland
, don’t you?
    BORGES: Oh, it’s a wonderful book! But when I read it, I don’t think I was quite as conscious of its being a nightmare book and I wonder if Lewis Carroll was. Maybe the nightmare touch is stronger because he wasn’t aware of it, no? And it came to him from something inner.
    I remember as a child I, of course, I gently enjoyed the book, but I felt that there was—of course, I never put this feeling into words—but I felt something eerie, something uncanny about it. But now when I reread it, I think the nightmare touches are pretty clear. And perhaps, perhaps Lewis Carroll disliked Sir John Tenniel’s pictures, well, they’re pen-and-ink drawings in the Victorian manner, very solid, and perhaps he thought, or he felt rather, that Sir John Tenniel had missed the nightmare touch and that he would have preferred something simpler.
    BURGIN: I don’t know if I believe in pictures with a book. Do you?
    BORGES: Henry James didn’t. Henry James didn’t because he said that pictures were taken in at a glance and so, of course, as the visual element is stronger, well, a picture makes an impact on you, that is, if you see, for example, a picture of a man, you see him all at once, while if you read an account of him or a description of him, then the description is successive, The illustration is entire, it