I marvel at how much of this stuff was wasted on the 20-year-old me. The ability to read things at multiple levels didn’t really come in for me until my, I don’t know, mid-30s maybe. I guess I was vaguely aware that different things were going on; it’s the interplay between them that’s new to me. Borges doesn’t just write a story that’s simultaneously a police procedural, a disquisition on the Kabbalah and a mathematical exercise; he builds each level so that it interlocks with the others. He makes them talk to each other.

How plain old funny this stuff is had also eluded me. As a literary undergraduate, you’re coached to take everything with total seriousness. It’s not until years later that you allow yourself to notice that this guy was, basically, playing. The more the narrator of “Pierre Menard” sucks up to his rich salon patronesses, the more his hate shines through. You can’t not laugh. These narrators are so unreliable you have no choice but to trust them, and so earnest that you can take nothing they say seriously.

In Borges’ world it only takes a few pages to put you into the habit of reading absurdly close. In a description of a found note on page 154 of my copy, the word “handwritten” is misprinted as “manuscristas,” rather than “manuscritas.” I don’t know what to make of this. It comes in the middle of a segment about obscure Talmudic reference texts. The error seems not quite random enough to be a real error, not quite suggestive enough to be intentional. The collection was first published in 1956; this was the tenth printing of just the paperback edition, after a long run in hardcover. (I got it in 1982; I know this because I solemnly, undergraduately, wrote the date on the title page.) How could a typo like that survive so many years of examination? What was Borges trying to pull? Right now I prefer to think he wanted me to write this paragraph. “Even this, perhaps, was foretold.”

Once I was in a seminar course on Latin American “boom” authors. This was the early 80s, when writers of political commitment were all the rage. You didn’t even pay attention to an author unless you could find some social or political agenda to celebrate in his work. Fair enough, I thought; when the writing is good, any motivation will do. But Borges, a rich, reactionary old bastard by all accounts, wasn’t doing well in this atmosphere. His action, such as it was, took place in Vienna and Dublin, not on the battle lines of the oppressed. His characters were aesthetes and pedants. His plots were puzzles. No one had time for that.

The brilliance of the work, therefore, presented a kind of a puzzle in itself. I remember one guy who came up with an ingenious workaround: the writer displayed, he said, “un compromiso vital” — a commitment… to life! Perhaps he wasn’t in exile like Cortazar or murdered like Neruda, but at least he was, um, alive. Yeah. I thought this was the most amazing bullshit, and I admired the guy for his cheek. (And for his ability to get through an entire pack of unfiltered cigarettes in one hour of class — I hope he’s still alive.)

I was, of course, wrong. Maybe the sadness that permeates these stories just isn’t visible to a 20-something. So Borges is all about the ambiguous interplay between appearance and substance, between word and thing. So what? How does that really work? Here’s how: the odd self-assurance, the Rubikian self-involvement, is the appearance that masks, and signals, the desperation, confusion and loss that make up the substance. These stories are set in a world that was falling apart, the world between the first and second world wars. Pierre Menard madly pounds out Quijote in Belgium while armies are massing to invade. Funes is condemned by his inability to forget; Lonnrot by his eye for the immanent patterns in everything. Everyone here is doomed; their only hope is to find some sort of order, some periodicity, in a world that shows no evidence of any such thing.

Update: Done with 2001. Intervening years to follow as time allows.