Borges at Eighty - some extracts

BARNSTONE: I have some questions. Maybe wordy, but your answers won’t be.

BORGES: They will be laconic, yes?

BARNSTONE: We know that consciousness resides in every other human being, yet we possess an awareness of only our own mind. At times we wake, as it were, to a puzzling knowledge of the mind’s separate existence.

BORGES: Well, but this is a question on the nature of solipsism, no? Now, I don’t believe in solipsism, because if I did I’d go mad. But of course it is a curious fact that we exist.

At the same time, I feel I am not dreaming you, or, let’s put it the other way, that you are not dreaming me. But this fact of wondering at life may stand for the essence of poetry. All poetry consists in feeling things as being strange, while all rhetoric consists in thinking of them as quite common, as obvious. Of course I am puzzled by the fact of my existing, of my existing in a human body, of my looking through eyes, hearing through ears, and so on. And maybe everything I have written is a mere metaphor, a mere variation on that central theme of being puzzled by things. In that case, I suppose, there’s no essential difference between philosophy and poetry, since both stand for the same kind of puzzlement. Except that in the case of philosophy the answer is given in a logical way, and in the case of poetry you use metaphor. If you use language, you have to use metaphors all the time. Since you know my works (well, let the word go at that. I don’t think of them as works, really), since you know my exercises, I suppose you have felt that I was being puzzled all the time, and I was trying to find a foundation for my puzzlement.

*

BARNSTONE: In Cincinnati when an admirer said “May you live one thousand years,” you answered “I look forward happily to my death.” What did you mean by that?

BORGES: I mean that when I’m unhappy—and that happens quite often to all of us—I find a real consolation in the thought that in a few years, or maybe in a few days, I’ll be dead and then all this won’t matter. I look forward to being blotted out. But if I thought that my death was a mere illusion, that after death I would go on, then I would feel very, very unhappy. For, really, I’m sick and tired of myself. Now, of course if I go on and I have no personal memory of ever having been Borges, then in that case it won’t matter to me because I may have been hundreds of odd people before I was born, but those things won’t worry me, since I will have forgotten them. When I think of mortality, of death, I think of those things in a hopeful way, in an expectant way. I should say I am greedy for death, that I want to stop waking up every morning, finding: Well, here I am, I have to go back to Borges.

There’s a word in Spanish, I suppose you know. I wonder if it’s any longer in use. Instead of saying “to wake up,” you say recordarse, that is, to record yourself, to remember yourself. My mother used to say Que me recuerde a las ocho “I want to be recorded to myself at eight.” Every morning I get that feeling because I am more or less nonexistent. Then when I wake up, I always feel I’m being let down. Because, well, here I am. Here’s the same old stupid game going on. I have to be somebody. I have to be exactly that somebody. I have certain commitments. One of the commitments is to live through the whole day. Then I see all that routine before me, and all things naturally make me tired. Of course when you’re young, you don’t feel that way. You feel, well, I am so glad I’m back in this marvelous world. But I don’t think I ever felt that way. Even when I was young. Especially when I was young. Now I have resignation. Now I wake up and I say: I have to face another day. I let it go at that. I suppose that people feel in different ways because many people think of immortality as a kind of happiness, perhaps because they don’t realize it.

BARNSTONE: They don’t realize what?

BORGES: The fact that going on and on would be, let’s say, awful.

BARNSTONE: Would be another hell, as you say in one of your stories.

BORGES: Yes, it would be, yes. Since this life is already hell, why go in for more and more hell, for larger and larger doses!

BARNSTONE: For two hundred years?

BORGES: Yes. Well, of course you might say that those two hundred years don’t exist. For what really exists is the present moment. The present moment is being weighted down by the past and by the fear of the future. Really, when do we speak of the present moment? For the present moment is as much an abstraction as the past or the future. In the present moment, you always have some kind of past and some kind of future also. You are slipping all the time from one to the other.

BARNSTONE: But obviously you have great moments of pleasure during your life.

BORGES: Yes, I suppose everybody has. But I wonder. I suppose those moments are perhaps finer when you remember them. Because when you’re happy, you’re hardly conscious of things. The fact of being conscious makes for unhappiness.

BARNSTONE: To be conscious of happiness often lets in an intrusion of doubt.

BORGES: But I think I have known moments of happiness. I suppose all men have. There are moments, let’s say, love, riding, swimming, talking to a friend, let’s say, conversation, reading, even writing, or rather, not writing but inventing something. When you sit down to write it, then you are no longer happy because you’re worried by technical problems. But when you think out something, then I suppose you may be allowed to be happy. And there are moments when you’re slipping into sleep, and then you feel happy, or at least I do. I remember the first time I had sleeping pills. (They were efficient, of course, since they were new to me.) I used to say to myself: Now hearing that tramway turn around the corner, I won’t be able to hear the end of the noise it makes, the rumble, because I’ll be asleep. Then I felt very, very happy. I thought of unconsciousness.

*

BORGES: But of course, I live in memory. And I suppose a poet should live in memory because, after all, what is imagination? Imagination, I should say, is made of memory and of oblivion. It is a kind of blending of the two things.

BARNSTONE: You manage with time?

BORGES: Oh yes. Everybody who goes blind gets a kind of reward: a different sense of time. Time is no longer to be filled in at every moment by something. No. You know that you have just to live on, to let time live you. That makes for a certain comfort. I think it is a great comfort, or perhaps a great reward. A gift of blindness is that you feel time in a different way from most people, no? You have to remember and you have to forget. You shouldn’t remember everything because, well, the character I wrote about, Funes, goes mad because his memory is endless. Of course if you forgot everything, you would no longer exist. Because you exist in your past. Otherwise you wouldn’t even know who you were, what your name was. You should go in for a blending of the two elements, no? Memory and oblivion, and we call that imagination. That’s a high-sounding name.

*

BARNSTONE: Recently you spoke about having experienced, twice, moments you would call timeless, mystical. Would you be willing to speak about the unspeakable?

BORGES: Yes. Two timeless moments have been given me. One came through quite an ordinary way. Suddenly I felt somehow I am beyond time. And the other came after a woman had told me that she couldn’t love me and I felt very unhappy. I went for a long walk. I went to a railway station in the south of Buenos Aires. Then, suddenly, I got that feeling of timelessness, of eternity. I don’t know how long it lasted, since it was timeless. But I felt very grateful for it. Then I wrote a poem on the railway station wall (I shouldn’t have done that!). The poem is still there. So I’ve had the experience only twice in my life. But at the same time, I know people who’ve never had it and I know people who are having it all the time. My friend, a mystic, for example, abounds in ecstacies. I don’t. I’ve only had two experiences of timeless time in eighty years.

BARNSTONE: When you are in time—

BORGES: I’m in time all the time.

BARNSTONE: The other ninety-eight moments of your life, there’s the time of your mind, of dream, and then there’s the external time, the clock time, the measured time. You talk and write very much about time.

BORGES: Time is the essential riddle.

 *

BORGES: When I am unhappy—and I allow myself to be unhappy now and then—I think of death as the great salvation. After all, what on earth can it matter what happens to Jorge Luis Borges? I’ll see him no more. I think of death as a hope, a hope to be totally blotted out, obliterated, and I can count on that, and I know that there is no future life, no cause for fear or for hope. We shall simply vanish and that’s as it should be. I think of immortality as being a threat, but in fact it will never achieve anything. I am sure that I am not personally immortal. And I feel that death will prove a happiness, since what better thing can we expect than forgetfulness, oblivion? That’s the way I feel about it.