Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

“The countryside is so lovely that I don’t want to think about its cause.” That’s very strange, no? It’s a kind of non sequitur, no? Because he should have begun to think about the cause of that beauty. But I suppose he meant that he drank all those things in, and he felt quite happy about them, and he had no use for thinking. But generally speaking, I think men are more prone to metaphysical wondering than women. I think that women take the world for granted. Things for granted. And themselves, no? And circumstances for granted. I think circumstances especially.
    BURGIN: They confront each moment as a separate entity without thinking about all the circumstances that lead up to it.
    BORGES: No, because they think of …
    BURGIN: They take things one at a time.
    BORGES: Yes, they take them one at a time, and then they’re afraid of cutting a poor figure, or they think of themselves as being actresses, no? The whole world looking at them and, of course, admiring them.
    BURGIN: They do seem to be more self-conscious than men on the whole.
    BORGES: I have known very intelligent women who are quite incapable of philosophy. One of the most intelligent women I know, she’s one of my pupils; she studies Old English with me, well, she was wild over so many books and poets, then I told her to read Berkeley’s dialogues, three dialogues, and she could make nothing of them. And then I gave her a book of William James, some problems of philosophy, and she’s a very intelligent woman, but she couldn’t get inside the books.
    BURGIN: They bored her?
    BORGES: No, she didn’t see why people should be poring over things that seemed very simple to her. So I said, “Yes, but are you sure that time is simple, are you sure that space is simple, are you sure that consciousness is simple?” “Yes,” she said. “Well, but could you define them?” She said, “No, I don’t think I could, but I don’t feel puzzled by them.” That, I suppose, is generally what a woman would say, no? And she was a very intelligent woman.
    BURGIN: But, of course, there seems to be something in your mind that hasn’t blocked out this basic sense of wonder.
    BORGES: No.
    BURGIN: In fact, it’s at the centre of your work, this astonishment at the universe itself.
    BORGES: That’s why I cannot understand such writers as Scott Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis. But Sinclair Lewis has more humanity, no? I think besides that he sympathizes with his victims. When you read
Babbitt
, well, perhaps I think in the end, he became one with Babbitt. For as a writer has to write a novel, a very long novel with a single character, the only way to keep the novel and hero alive is to identify with him. Because if you write a long novel with a hero you dislike or a character that you know very little about, then the book falls to pieces. So, I suppose, that’s what happened to Cervantes in a way. When he began
Don Quixote
he knew very little about him and then, as he went on, he had to identify himself with Don Quixote, he must have felt that, I mean, that if he got a long distance from his hero and he was always poking fun at him and seeing him as a figure of fun, then the book would fall to pieces. So that, in the end, he
became
Don Quixote. He sympathized with him against the other creatures, well, against the Innkeeper and the Duke, and the Barber, and the Parson, and so on.
    BURGIN: So you think that remark of your father’s heralded the beginning of your own metaphysics?
    BORGES: Yes, it did.
    BURGIN: How old were you then?
    BORGES: I don’t know. I must have been a very young child. Because I remember he said to me, “Now look here; this is something that may amuse you,” and then, he was very fond of chess, he was a good chess player, and then he took me to the chessboard, and he explained to me the paradoxes of Zeno, Achilles and the Tortoise, you remember, the arrows, the fact that movement was impossible because there was always a point in between, and so on. And I remember him speaking of these things to me and I was very puzzled by them. And he explained them with the help of a chessboard.
    BURGIN: And your father had aspired to be a writer, you said.
    BORGES: Yes, he was a professor of psychology and a lawyer.
    BURGIN: And a lawyer also.
    BORGES: Well, no, he was a lawyer, but he was also a professor of psychology.
    BURGIN: Two separate disciplines.
    BORGES: Well, but he was interested in psychology and he had no use for the law. He told me