Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

great athlete, an archer and horseman. He has a large harem, and he reaches the age of twenty-nine. On his birthday, he goes out in a carriage and rides to one of the gates of the palace that faces north. And there he sees something he has never seen before: a strange person whose face is furrowed with wrinkles, who’s bent over, leaning on a cane, walking with hesitant step, and his hair is white. The prince asks about this strange person, who seems barely human, and the driver of the carriage says he is an old man, and that with the passage of time, he will be that old man, and that all men will be or have been old. Then he returns to his palace, very disturbed by what he has seen, and after a while he goes on another outing, along a different road, and he comes across a recumbent man, very pale, emaciated, perhaps his whiteness is from leprosy. He asks who he is, and they tell him that he is a sick man, and that with time he will be this sick man, that all men will be. Then, on his third outing he goes south, let’s say, and something even stranger occurs. He sees several men carrying another man who seems to be sleeping, but he isn’t breathing. He asks who he is, and they tell him he is a dead man. It is the first time he has heard the word “dead.” Then he goes out a fourth time and sees an old, but robust, man wearing a yellow robe, and he asks who he is. They tell him he is a hermit, a yogi (the word “yoga” has the same root as “
yoke
,” which means “discipline”), and that man is beyond all the world’s adversity. Then Prince Siddhartha flees from the palace and decides to seek salvation; he becomes the Buddha and teaches salvation to mankind. And, according to one version of this legend—please forgive me this digression, but the story is beautiful—the prince, the driver, and the four characters he sees—the old man, the sick man, the dead man, and the hermit—are all the same person. That is, he has taken on different forms to fulfill the destiny of the Bodhisattva, the pre-Buddha. (There is an echo of this word in the name Josaphat.) Now some echo of this legend must have reached Johnson, because the prince in that legend is the same: we have a prince in reclusive captivity in Happy Valley. And this prince reaches the age of twenty-six—which could be an echo of twenty-nine in the Buddha legend—and he feels the dissatisfaction of having all his desires gratified. As soon as he wants something, he has it. This leads him into a state of despair. He leaves the palace filled with musicians and pleasures . . . he leaves the palace and goes out to walk alone. Then he sees the animals, the gazelles, the crows. Farther up, along the slopes of the mountains, are the camels, the elephants. And he thinks that those animals are happy because all they have to do is wish for something and once their needs are met, they doze off. But in man there is some kind of infinite longing: once everything he can desire is satisfied, he will desire other things, and he doesn’t even know what they are. Then he meets an inventor. This inventor has invented a flying machine. He suggests to the prince that he might want to board it and escape from Happy Valley and learn firsthand about the suffering of humanity. Then there’s a somewhat funny passage that AlfonsoReyes quotes in his book
Rilindero
. 5 It is as if it were a foreshadowing of the science fiction of our day, the work of Wells or Bradbury: the inventor takes off from a tower in his rudimentary machine, crashes, breaks a leg, and then the prince realizes that he has to find some other way of escaping from the valley. Then he talks to Imlac, the poet whose concept of poetry we have already discussed; he talks to his sister, who is as weary of happiness as he is—of the immediate gratification of every desire—and they decide to escape from the valley. And here the novel suddenly turns into a psychological story. Because Johnson tells us that for a year the prince was so happy at having made the decision to escape, that this decision itself was enough for him, and he did nothing to carry through with it. Every morning he thinks, “I’m going to escape from the valley,” then spend his time enjoying the banquets, the music, the pleasure of the senses and the intellect, and this is how he spent two years. One morning, he understood that he had been living on hope. So he went out to explore the mountains, to see if he could find anything, and