Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

about the physical presence of evil: illness, old age, death, the injustices that every man must suffer, and the different forms of bitterness we find in life.
    There is a poem by Blake—it is included in all the anthologies—where this problem is expressed, but of course is not resolved. It corresponds to Blake’s third or fourth book, his
Songs ofExperience
(prior to that, he published
Songs of Innocence
and the
Book of Thel
, and in these books he talks mostly about a love and a kindness that are behind the universe in spite of all apparent suffering). 4 In
Songs of Experience
, Blake deals directly with the problem of evil, and he symbolizes it, in the manner of the bestiaries of the Middle Ages, as a tiger. The poem, which consists of five or six stanzas, is called “TheTyger,” and was illustrated by the author.
    This poem is not about a real tiger, but rather an archetypical tiger, a Platonic, eternal tiger. The poem begins like this—I will translate the lines into Spanish, quickly and poorly:
Tigre, tigre ardiente
que resplandeces en las selvas de la noche
Qué mano inmortal o qué ojo
pudo forjar tu terrible simetría?
[Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?]
    Then he wonders how the tiger was formed, in what forge, with what kinds of hammers, and then he reaches the principal question of the poem:
Cuando los hombres arrojaron sus lanzas,
y mojaron la tierra con sus lágrimas,
A quel que te hizo sonrió?
A quel que hizo al cordero te hizo?
[When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?]
    That is: How could God—omnipotent and merciful—have created the tiger and the lamp that would be devoured by it?
    Then “Did he smile his work to see?” “He” is God, of course. That is, Blake is entranced by the tiger, the symbol, the emblem of evil. And we could say that the rest of Blake’s oeuvre is devoted to answering this question. Needless to say, this question has preoccupied many philosophers. We haveLeibniz in the eighteenth century. 5 Leibniz said we live in the best of all possible worlds, and he invented an allegory to justify this affirmation. Leibniz imagines the world—not the real world, but rather the possible world—as a pyramid, one with a top but no base. That is, a pyramid that can continue infinitely, indefinitely, downward. The pyramid has many floors. And Leibniz imagines a man who lives his entire life on one of those floors. Then his soul reincarnates to a higher floor, and this continues an indeterminate number of times. And finally he arrives at the highest floor, the top of the pyramid, and he believes he is in paradise. And then he remembers his previous lives, and the inhabitants of this floor remind him, tell him, that he is on Earth. That is, we are in the best of all possible worlds. And to make fun of this doctrine, somebody, I think it wasVoltaire, called it “optimism,” and when he wrote
Candide
, he wanted to show that in this “best of all possible worlds,” there exists, nonetheless, illness, death, the earthquake in Lisbon, the difference between rich and poor. And somebody called this, also a bit jokingly, “pessimism.” So the words “optimism” and “pessimism” that we now use—we call a person an optimist when we want to say he is in a good mood or he tends to see the bright side of things—were invented as a joke to poke holes in Leibniz’s doctrine and in the ideas ofSwift and Voltaire—pessimists—who asserted that it was Christianity that stated that this world was a vale of tears, asserting the bitterness of our lives.
    Such arguments were used to justify evil, to justify cruelty, envy, or a toothache, we could say. It was said that in a painting there could not be only beautiful and shimmering colors but also others; or also, it was said that music needed moments of disharmony. And this Leibniz, who liked ingenious but misleading illustrations, imagined two libraries. One contains a thousand copies, let us say, of the
Aeneid
, considered a perfect work. In the other library, there is only one copy of the
Aeneid
and nine hundred and ninety-nine inferior books. And then Leibniz wonders which of the two libraries is better, and he reaches the obvious conclusion that the second one, containing a thousand books of different qualities, is superior to the first, which