It is practically impossible to condense everything I think about Jorge Luis Borges, in competition with James Joyce as my favourite author, into 500 words. The man can do more in five pages than most writers could do with their entire lives; nearly everything I have read by him has left my mind swimming and permanently imprinted itself on my consciousness. I first read Ficciones (in Collected Fictions translated by Andrew Hurley) over two years ago, and, even before rereading for this class, I remember every story vividly. Some of the mock-academic details, such as the early works of Pierre Menard, obviously faded from my memory, but I don’t think I could ever forget some of the problems raised by his stories. He deals with philosophical topics in a more thought-provoking way than most philosophers, never concerned with upholding an argument so much as with proposing questions without truly satisfactory answers.

The first time I read “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” still my favourite of all his stories, it felt like I was rewiring the fundamental structures of my mind. It touches on every element I love in his writing: mysterious investigations into arcane topics, the blending of reality and fiction, moments of surreal comedy, and philosophical speculations with implications that go far beyond the fourteen pages (unusually long for Borges) of the text.  I feel like I could adequately summarize many of his other stories in a couple sentences, but Tlön in its entirety always escapes me; every sentence is packed with ideas to the point of overflowing and attempting to summarize it feels a bit like crafting the map in his “On Exactitude in Science” (pg 325 in Collected Fictions).

As someone who can sometimes have trouble suspending disbelief while reading fiction, Borges demolishes any boundaries separating the reader from the text. It frequently feels while reading him as if I am literally within the story, that life as we live it is simply a higher level of metafiction, and that we too are as imagined as the protagonist of “The Circular Ruins” in an infinite sequence of impermanent, contradictory realities. Many of his stories – “The Library of Babel,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “The Aleph” (unfortunately not included in Labyrinths) – are like attempts to illustrate infinity, effectively implicating the reader within that. But this is not done in a nihilistic way; human existence is not denigrated for its insignificance so much as expounded for its finitude. This is demonstrated nowhere better than in “Funes the Memorious,” where the burden of infinity crushes the titular character’s mind and renders him incapable of abstract thought. The infinite exists for us only as finite observers; Borges is not referring to some abstraction somewhere out there, but something that exists within us and that we are inextricably bound up in. If the questions he raises have no satisfactory answer, this is because the only possible answer is this inexpressible infinite that can only vaguely be alluded to in writing but stretches into every aspect of our lives and beyond.

As a question, where else do people see the concept of infinity in Borges’s writing?