Reality Is Perplexing Enough: An Interview with Jorge Luis Borges (1968)

My introduction to Borges was stumbling across this taxonomy of animals:

    those that belong to the Emperor,
    embalmed ones,
    those that are trained,
    suckling pigs,
    mermaids,
    fabulous ones,
    stray dogs,
    those included in the present classification,
    those that tremble as if they were mad,
    innumerable ones,
    those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
    others,
    those that have just broken a flower vase,
    those that from a long way off look like flies.

The mental boundaries that were broken as a result of this list...

https://multicians.org/thvv/borges-animals.html

Borges spoke English fluently, too, and there is a great lecture series by him on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/YSLV7t9DvN8

As luck would have it, I am currently revisiting The Book of Imaginary Beings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Imaginary_Beings

Wow, thanks for posting that, what a great read!

I always loved Theroux's more narrative article about Borges [0], but this one you can really feel where he's coming from directly.

[0] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/31/r...

One of my favorite short stories by Jorge Luis Borges is The Library of Babel[0], in which characters live in an infinite library that enumerates all possible strings of a certain length in book form. It even has an online version[1]! You can find the version of this post at[2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

[1] https://libraryofbabel.info/

[2] https://libraryofbabel.info/book.cgi?c4rswwjyq92rx9b0t433js5...

Check out the podcast ‘Very Bad Wizards’ and their episodes about Borges

This was refreshing. Thanks for sharing