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A review by uncleflannery
Dreamtigers by Jorge Luis Borges
5.0
Strange and prismatic. I wish I could read this forever.
"Islam asserts that on the unappealable day of judgment every perpetrator of the image of a living creature will be raised from the dead with his works, and he will be commanded to bring them to life, and he will fail, and be cast out with them into the fires of punishment. As a child, I felt before large mirrors that same horror of a spectral duplication or multiplication of reality... I watched them with misgivings. Sometimes I feared they might begin to deviate from reality; other times I was afraid of seeing there my own face, disfigured by strange calamities. I have learned that this fear is again monstrously abroad in the world. The story is simple indeed, and disagreeable."
"It was at the foot of the next-to-last tower that the poet-- who was as if untouched by the wonders that amazed the rest-- recited the brief composition we find today indissolubly linked to his name and which, as the more elegant historians have it, gave him immortality and death. The text has been lost. There are some who contend it consisted of a single line; others say it had but a single world. The truth, the incredible truth, is that in the poem stood the enormous palace, entire and minutely detailed, with each illustrious porcelain and every sketch on every porcelain and the shadows and the light of the twilights and each unhappy or joyous moment of the glorious dynasties of mortals, gods, and dragons who had dwelled in it from the interminable past. All fell silent, but the Emperor exclaimed, "You have robbed me of my palace!" And the executioner's iron sword cut the poet down.
Others tell the story differently. There cannot be any two things alike in the world; the poet, they say, had only to utter the poem to make the palace disappear, as if abolished and blown to bits by the final syllable. Such legends, of course, amount to no more than literary fiction. The poet was a slave of the Emperor and as such he died. His composition sank into oblivion and his descendants still seek, nor will they find, the one word that contains the universe."
"Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the wild beast I long for."
Reading Borges requires a certain faith, a suspension of disbelief, like religion or astrology. If you're not into it I'm sure all this comes off as tedious, pretentious, and overblown. BUT! If you have the patience I promise this book will send you straight down the rabbit hole. If anything, this collection left me sad to live in a world so big and beautiful and to have still never finished Don Quixote (nor even started the Divine Comedy):
"Tradition has it that, on waking, [Dante] felt he had been given-- and then lost-- something infinite, something he would not be able to recover, or even to glimpse, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of man."
"Islam asserts that on the unappealable day of judgment every perpetrator of the image of a living creature will be raised from the dead with his works, and he will be commanded to bring them to life, and he will fail, and be cast out with them into the fires of punishment. As a child, I felt before large mirrors that same horror of a spectral duplication or multiplication of reality... I watched them with misgivings. Sometimes I feared they might begin to deviate from reality; other times I was afraid of seeing there my own face, disfigured by strange calamities. I have learned that this fear is again monstrously abroad in the world. The story is simple indeed, and disagreeable."
"It was at the foot of the next-to-last tower that the poet-- who was as if untouched by the wonders that amazed the rest-- recited the brief composition we find today indissolubly linked to his name and which, as the more elegant historians have it, gave him immortality and death. The text has been lost. There are some who contend it consisted of a single line; others say it had but a single world. The truth, the incredible truth, is that in the poem stood the enormous palace, entire and minutely detailed, with each illustrious porcelain and every sketch on every porcelain and the shadows and the light of the twilights and each unhappy or joyous moment of the glorious dynasties of mortals, gods, and dragons who had dwelled in it from the interminable past. All fell silent, but the Emperor exclaimed, "You have robbed me of my palace!" And the executioner's iron sword cut the poet down.
Others tell the story differently. There cannot be any two things alike in the world; the poet, they say, had only to utter the poem to make the palace disappear, as if abolished and blown to bits by the final syllable. Such legends, of course, amount to no more than literary fiction. The poet was a slave of the Emperor and as such he died. His composition sank into oblivion and his descendants still seek, nor will they find, the one word that contains the universe."
"Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the wild beast I long for."
Reading Borges requires a certain faith, a suspension of disbelief, like religion or astrology. If you're not into it I'm sure all this comes off as tedious, pretentious, and overblown. BUT! If you have the patience I promise this book will send you straight down the rabbit hole. If anything, this collection left me sad to live in a world so big and beautiful and to have still never finished Don Quixote (nor even started the Divine Comedy):
"Tradition has it that, on waking, [Dante] felt he had been given-- and then lost-- something infinite, something he would not be able to recover, or even to glimpse, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of man."