Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

Encyclopaedia
or the American edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
with the engravings of animals and pyramids.
    BURGIN: So you remember the books of your childhood better than the people.
    BORGES: Yes, because I could see them.
    BURGIN: You’re not in touch with any people that you knew from your childhood now? Have you had any lifelong friends?
    BORGES: Well, some school companions from Buenos Aires and then, of course, my mother, she’s ninety-one; my sister who’s three years, three or four years, younger than I am, she’s a painter. And then, most of my relatives—most of them have died.
    BURGIN: Had you read much before you started to write or did your writing and reading develop together?
    BORGES: I’ve always been a greater reader than a writer. But, of course, I began to lose my eyesight definitely in 1954, and since then I’ve done my reading by proxy, no? Well, of course, when one cannot read, then one’s mind works in a different way. In fact, it might be said that there is a certain benefit in being unable to read, because you think that time flows in a different way. When I had my eyesight, then if I had to spend say a half an hour without doing anything, I would go mad. Because I had to be reading. But now, I can be alone for quite a long time, I don’t mind long railroad journeys, I don’t mind being alone in a hotel or walking down the street, because, well, I won’t say that I am thinking all the time because that would be bragging.
    I think I am able to live with a lack of occupation. I don’t have to be talking to people or doing things. If somebody had gone out, and I had come here and found the house empty, then I would have been quite content to sit down and let two or three hours pass and go out for a short walk, but I wouldn’t feel especially unhappy or lonely. That happens to all people who go blind.
    BURGIN: What are you thinking about during that time—a specific problem or …
    BORGES: I could or I might not be thinking about anything, I’d just be living on, no? Letting time flow or perhaps looking back on memories or walking across a bridge and trying to remember favourite passages, but maybe I wouldn’t be doing anything, I’d just be living. I never understand why people say they’re bored because they have nothing to do. Because sometimes I have nothing whatever to do, and I don’t feel bored. Because I’m not doing things all the time, I’m content.
    BURGIN: You’ve never felt bored in your life?
    BORGES: I don’t think so. Of course, when I had to be ten days lying on my back after an operation I felt anguish, but not boredom.
    BURGIN: You’re a metaphysical writer and yet so many writers like, for example, Jane Austen or Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis, seem to have no real metaphysical feeling at all.
    BORGES: When you speak of Fitzgerald, you’re thinking of Edward Fitzgerald, no? Or Scott Fitzgerald?
    BURGIN: Yes, the latter.
    BORGES: Ah, yes.
    BURGIN: I was just naming a writer who came to mind as having essentially no metaphysical feeling.
    BORGES: He was always on the surface of things, no? After all, why shouldn’t you, no?
    BURGIN: Of course, most people live and die without ever, it seems, really thinking about the problems of time or space or infinity.
    BORGES: Well, because they take the universe for granted. They take things for granted. They take themselves for granted. That’s true. They never wonder at anything, no? They don’t think it’s strange that they should be living. I remember the first time I felt that was when my father said to me, “What a queer thing,” he said, “that I should be living, as they say, behind my eyes, inside my head, I wonder if that makes sense?” And then, it was the first time I felt that, and then instantly I pounced upon that because I knew what he was saying. But many people can hardly understand that. And they say, “Well, but where else could you live?”
    BURGIN: Do you think there’s something in people’s minds that blocks out the sense of the miraculous, something maybe inherent in most human beings that doesn’t allow them to think about these things? Because, after all, if they spent their time thinking about the miracle of the universe, they wouldn’t do the work civilization depends on and nothing, perhaps, would get done.
    BORGES: But I think that today too many things get done.
    BURGIN: Yes, of course.
    BORGES: Sarmiento wrote that he once met a gaucho and the gaucho said to him,