Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

had fought the War of Independence, the War of Brazil and the Civil War. When he was about to marry, his wife asked him about the men he had killed. And then he told her that he had only killed one man, and that was a Spaniard he had to run through with a lance in order to save a friend of his who had been taken prisoner. He said that was the one man he killed in the War of Independence, the War of Brazil and the Civil War. Now I suspect that he was lying, but that he knew at the same time that she must have felt a kind of horror at the idea that she was going to give herself to a bloodstained man, no? So I suppose he invented that in order to calm her.
    You remember, the battle of Junín lasted three quarters of an hour—not a shot was fired, the whole thing was done with spears and swords. It stands to reason that someone was going to get killed, and that he would have known it. And besides, I knew he had many executed. But I suppose that in a sense he felt that what he had done was awful, or rather, perhaps he felt that those things were awful to a woman but not to a man, no? I don’t think he was a clear thinker or anything of the kind, but he must have felt what all soldiers feel, well, these things have to be done and I’ve done them, and I’m not ashamed of it, but why speak of those things to a woman who cannot be expected to understand? I suppose he was lying, because battles, well, they were very primitive in those days and quite small affairs, but the fact that they were primitive and small affairs may, I suppose—if a man killed anybody he had to be quite sure about it, no? Because if you are hacking away with a sword at somebody, you know whether you’ve killed him or not.
    BURGIN: I’ve always felt that by working out the rational consequences of mystic ideas, you’ve written about the things people are most astonished at or afraid of, that you’ve selected things to write about that are really even more terrifying than death, like infinity.
    BORGES: But I don’t think of death as being terrifying. I was going over a sonnet with di Giovanni and the subject of that sonnet; I began by saying to the reader that he was invulnerable, that nothing could happen to him, that God had given to him the certainty of dust, mortality, and that, after all, if one day he should die, he could always fall back on the fact that life was a mere dream. But I don’t think of death as being terrifying.
    BURGIN: What about infinity?
    BORGES: Infinity, yes, because infinity is an intellectual problem. Death means you stop being, you cease from thinking, or feeling, or wondering, and at least you’re lucky in that you don’t have to worry. You might as well worry, as the Latin poet said, about the ages, and ages that preceded you when you did not exist. You might as well worry about the endless past as the endless future uninhabited by you … Infinity, yes, that’s a problem, but death isn’t a problem in that sense. There’s no difficulty whatever in imagining that even as I go to sleep every night, I may have a long sleep at the end. I mean it’s not an intellectual problem. I don’t understand Unamuno, because Unamuno wrote that God, for him, was the provider of immortality, that he couldn’t believe in a God who didn’t believe in immortality. I don’t see that. There might be a God who might not want me to go on living, or who might think that the universe does not need me. After all, it did not need me until 1899, when I was born. I was left out until it did.
    BURGIN: Perhaps a stronger argument against God might be the idea of random happenings. The fact that people can be born as freaks, physical freaks, or that, people can be born paralysed.
    BORGES: Oh, yes, of course. In fact, there are many arguments against God, but there are only four arguments for His existence.
    BURGIN: Four arguments? Which are they?
    BORGES: Well, one is called the ontological argument; it seems to be a mere trick. It runs thus. Can you imagine a perfect being, all powerful, all wise, and so on, and then you say yes, no?
    BURGIN: Yes.
    BORGES: Now, does that being exist or not?
    BURGIN: Well, then the answer is, if you imagine him, he exists.
    BORGES: No, no. Then you would say no, I don’t know.
    BURGIN: You have to say no?
    BORGES: Or, I don’t know. Then here the argument is clinched, in a very unconvincing way as I see it. You said that you could imagine a perfect being, a being all wise, all knowing; well, if that