Paromita’s Reviews > Borges and Me > Status Update

“Borges makes these perfect little texts, essays that are stories. It’s all poetry, a kind of spell. After reading Borges, if you miss a train, the event will feel drenched in meaning.” Alastair had taken flight, his eyes wide, his nostrils almost flaring like a bull’s before his charge, and I guessed he’d sampled his brownie mix at some point earlier in the afternoon. “Literature, after Borges, must change.”

“Anguish is pain multiplied by resistance. So they say, and I believe them. You will have to grieve.”
The word itself, grieve, puzzled me. I didn’t know how this process might unfold but guessed I would come to accept Billy’s death in due course. What choice did I have?

“ALASTAIR IS BACK,” I said as we drove out of Stirling.
“El magnífico returns! Our adventure, Giuseppe, has ended. There’s a melancholy in these endings, don’t you agree? I dislike the last pages of any good book, as I anticipate the coming losses, the vacancy.”

“No matter. Think of this: Leibniz and Isaac Newton each discovered the calculus in the same century, but they never knew each other.”
“What does that mean?”
“Ideas arise independently from the same mysterious source.”

...But it’s impossible to win. There’s never a total victory. That would be death. The victories of the living are partial at best. We vomit on ourselves, but we wash our shoes clean. And begin again.”

“Yes, a war between the mind and sky. Marvelous, your poet! We fight our battles over and over. For us, it’s the effort to express reality. It’s a battle. I feel sad at times, lonely and detached from reality. But the sky overwhelms me, even though I’m blind. The sun is too bright, blinding a blind man! This is the reality we encounter and wrestle into words. This wrestling is our life. ..

Was there ever a more foolish or cruel war? All the dead young men, on both sides, depressed me. What was the point?

I wanted to say something, to burrow into this unspoken area, to find a place where poetry became a kind of restoration of the self, giving as Shakespeare said a “local habitation and a name” to “airy nothing.” I knew I must say whatever I saw, looking around as well as inside of me. Description was revelation.

“I do wonder, sir: what is a poem? I mean, how would you define it?”
“A poem is the next best thing to silence,” he said.
“So why bother?” Ailith asked.
“I feel a surge of joy most days, fleetingly. The light and dark that one sees on the water in the bay. My work is this, to re-create a part of that happiness with marks on the page. The exaltation can be felt, I hope. Here and there.”
“And the sadness,” I said.

O western wind, when wilt thou blow
that the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
The lyric’s deep, lonely cry of need, at once beautiful and painful, had somehow evaded me until now, however many times I’d read it.