Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

being does not exist, then it isn’t perfect. Because how can a nonexistent being be perfect? So you have to add existence to it. It’s not a very convincing argument, no? And then it was made still worse. It went, does God exist? I don’t know. Does a man exist? Well, he seems to exist. Then you think that God, who is eternal, omnipotent, and so on, cannot achieve what a man has to start with? And God, who is so wise, cannot even attain to manhood? Well, of course, that’s not an argument. In fact, if you say that God cannot succeed in existing, you are really supposing there is existence, no? Because if you don’t exist you cannot succeed or fail at it.
    BURGIN: Do you think that a lot of philosophy has been wasted arguing about the existence of God, or can you still derive enjoyment from it?
    BORGES: I can derive great enjoyment from it, the enjoyment I get out of detective novels or science fiction. Enjoyment of the imagination. But I don’t think anybody could take it too seriously. Of course, you may believe in God, I daresay there is a God, but I don’t believe in Him because of those arguments. I should say that I believe in God in spite of theology. Theologians follow the rules of the games; you accept certain premises and you have to accept the conclusions.
    BURGIN: You once said that if a man is happy, he doesn’t want to write or really do anything, he just wants to be.
    BORGES: Yes, because happiness is an end in itself. That’s one of the advantages, or perhaps the only advantage, of unhappiness. That unhappiness
has
to be transmuted into something.
    BURGIN: So then, your own writing proceeds out of a sense of sorrow.
    BORGES: I think that all writing comes out of unhappiness. I suppose that when Mark Twain was writing about the Mississippi and about the rafts, I suppose he was simply looking at his own past, no? He had a kind of homesickness for the Mississippi … Of course, when you’re happy you don’t need anything, no? Now I can be happy, but not for a long time.
    BURGIN: Walt Whitman tried to write some poems about happiness, but we see through them so that …
    BORGES: But Whitman, I think, overdid it. Because in him everything is wonderful, you know? I don’t think that anybody could really believe that everything is wonderful, no? Except in a sense of it being a wonder. Of course, you can do without that particular kind of miracle. No, in the case of Whitman I think he thought it was his duty as an American to be happy. And that he had to cheer up his readers. Of course, he wanted to be unlike any other poet, but Whitman worked with a programme, I should say, he began with a theory and then he went on to his work. I don’t think of him as a spontaneous writer.
    BURGIN: Although he tries to convey the impression of spontaneity.
    BORGES: Well, he had to do it.
    BURGIN: Do you think any poets are really spontaneous?
    BORGES: No, but I think that if you’re writing about unhappiness, feeling bleak or discouraged, it can be done more sincerely … Somebody wrote, I think it was William Henry Hudson, that he had tried to—I think he was quoting someone else—that he wanted to study philosophy and that he tried to read, well, I don’t know, Hume or Spinoza, but he couldn’t do it because happiness was always breaking in. He really was just bragging, no? In the case of most people, happiness isn’t always breaking in, but if it breaks in, you are thankful for it.
    BURGIN: But don’t you think many people are ashamed to admit they’re happy? In fact, Bertrand Russell wrote a book called
The Right to Be Happy
.
    BORGES: Well, because people felt that if other people were unhappy, their happiness would be resented. I don’t think we need be afraid of feeling too happy, no? For example, if suddenly, walking down the street or sitting here in my room, I feel happy, I think I’d better accept it and not pry into it. Because if I pry into it, I shall find that I have far too many reasons for being unhappy. But I think that one should accept happiness, and perhaps unexplained happiness is all to the better because I think that’s something right in your body, no? Or in your mind. But if you’re happy because of something that has happened, then you may be unhappy the next moment. I mean if you are just being spontaneously, innocently, happy, that’s all to the good. Of course, that doesn’t happen too often.
    BURGIN: You once said to me that you could envision a world without