Borges and Reading

"Borges: [...] If you begin a book, if at the end of fifteen or twenty pages you feel that the book is a task for you, then lay that book and lay that author aside for a time because it won't do you any good. 

[...]

Burgin: If enjoyment is paramount, then what do you suppose it is that gives one a sense of enjoyment from a book? 

Borges: There may be two opposite explanations to that. The individual is getting away from his personal circumstances and finding his way into another world, but at the same time, perhaps that other world interests him because it's nearer his inner self than his circumstances."

Jorge Luis Borges, The Last Interview and Other Conversations 

Borges and the Greatest Novelists

"When I was a young man I thought Dostoevsky was the greatest novelist. And then after ten years or so, when I reread him, I felt greatly disappointed. I felt that the characters were unreal and that also the characters were part of a plot. Because in real life, even in a difficult situation, even when you are worried very much about something, even when you feel anguish or when you feel hatred-well, I've never felt hatred-or love or fury maybe, you also live along other lines, no? I mean, a man is in love, but at the same time he is interested in the cinema, or he is thinking about mathematics or poetry or politics, while in novels, in most novels, the characters are simply living through what's happening to them. No, that might be the case with very simple people, but I don't see, I don't think that happens.

[...]

Kafka is closer to poetry really. He works with metaphors and types as opposed to characters."

Jorge Luis Borges, The Last Interview and Other Conversations 

Borges and Insomnia

"And then there was a clock. It worried me very much. Because with a clock you may doze off, and then you may try to humbug yourself into thinking that you've slept a long time. If you have a clock, then it will give you the time in the face every quarter of the hour, and then you say, "Well, now it's two o'clock, not it's quarter past, now half past two , now quarter to three, now the three strokes," and then you go on and on...It's awful. Because you know you haven't missed any of the strokes."

Jorge Luis Borges, The Last Interview and Other Conversations 

Borges and Memory

"I remember my father said to me something about memory, a very saddening thing. He said, "I thought I could recall my childhood when we first came to Buenos Aires, but now I know that I can't." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because I think that memory"-I don't know if this was his own theory, I was so impressed by it that I didn't ask him whether he found it or whether he evolved it-but he said, "I think that if I recall something, for example, if today I look back on this morning, then I get an image of what I saw this morning. But if tonight, I'm thinking back on this morning, then what I'm really recalling is not the first image, but the first image in memory. So that every time I recall something, I'm not recalling it really, I'm recalling the last time I recalled it, I'm recalling my last memory of it. So that really," he said, "I have no memories whatever, I have no images whatever, about my childhood, about my youth. And then he illustrates that, with a pile of coins. He piled one coin on top of the other and said, "Well, now this first coin, the bottom coin, this would be the first image, for example, of the house of my childhood. Now this second would be a memory I had of that house when I went to Buenos Aires. Then the third one another memory and so on. And as in every memory there's a slight distortion, I don't suppose that my memory of today ties in with the first images I had," so that, he said, "I try not to think of things in the past because if I do I'll be thinking back on those memories and not on the actual images themselves." And then that saddened me. To think maybe we have no true memories of youth. [...] 

That it [the past] can be distorted by successive repetition. Because if in every repetition you get a slight distortion, then in the end you will be a long way off from the issue."

Jorge Luis Borges, The Last Interview and Other Conversations 

Borges and Philosophy

"It is enough for me to say that if I am rich in anything it is in perplexities rather than in certainties. A colleague declares from his chair that philosophy is clear and precise understanding. I would define it as that organisation of the essential perplexities of man."

Jorge Luis Borges, The Last Interview and Other Conversations 

...[l]ay aside all your philosophical, religious, and political opinions, and [to] become almost like an infant, knowing nothing. Nothing, that is, except what you actually hear, see, feel, and smell. Take it that you are not going anywhere but here, and that there never was, is, or will be any other time than now. Simply be aware of what actually is without giving it names and without judging it, for you are now feeling out reality itself instead of ideas and opinions about it. There is no point in trying to suppress the babble of words and ideas that goes on in most adult brains, so if it won't stop, let it go on as it will, and listen to it as if it were the sound of traffic or the clucking of hens. 

Let your ears hear whatever they want to hear; let your eyes see whatever they want to see; let your mind think whatever it wants to think; let your lungs breathe in their own rhythm. Do not expect any special result, for in this wordless and idealess state, where can there be past or future, and where any notion of purpose? 

Tao: The Watercourse Way, Alan Watts