Borges at Eighty: Conversations

by Jorge Luis Borges

  *Title is actually Historia de la noche, History of the Night.

  2

  When I Wake Up

  WFIU, Indiana University,

  March 1976 When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself.

  WILLIS BARNSTONE: In case you want a hardboiled egg?

  JORGE LUIS BORGES: Why, of course.

  BARNSTONE: And I’ll crack it for you.

  BORGES: Look here, if not, I can’t break a hardboiled egg. Not a hard-boiled one!

  BARNSTONE: It’s good to bring hardboiled eggs into radio stations, no?

  BORGES: A fine combination, I feel. Hardboiled eggs and radio stations!

  BARNSTONE: Borges, would you put them in a poem?

  BORGES: No, I wouldn’t. Yet I suppose all things are right for a poem. All words are right. In fact, all things are. Anything can be done, you know, but very few things can be talked about.

  BARNSTONE: I have some questions. Maybe wordy, but your answers won’t be.

  BORGES: They will be laconic, yes?

  BARNSTONE: We know that consciousness resides in every other human being, yet we possess an awareness of only our own mind. At times we wake, as it were, to a puzzling knowledge of the mind’s separate existence.

  BORGES: Well, but this is a question on the nature of solipsism, no? Now, I don’t believe in solipsism, because if I did I’d go mad. But of course it is a curious fact that we exist.

  At the same time, I feel I am not dreaming you, or, let’s put it the other way, that you are not dreaming me. But this fact of wondering at life may stand for the essence of poetry. All poetry consists in feeling things as being strange, while all rhetoric consists in thinking of them as quite common, as obvious. Of course I am puzzled by the fact of my existing, of my existing in a human body, of my looking through eyes, hearing through ears, and so on. And maybe everything I have written is a mere metaphor, a mere variation on that central theme of being puzzled by things. In that case, I suppose, there’s no essential difference between philosophy and poetry, since both stand for the same kind of puzzlement. Except that in the case of philosophy the answer is given in a logical way, and in the case of poetry you use metaphor. If you use language, you have to use metaphors all the time. Since you know my works (well, let the word go at that. I don’t think of them as works, really), since you know my exercises, I suppose you have felt that I was being puzzled all the time, and I was trying to find a foundation for my puzzlement.

  BARNSTONE: In Cincinnati when an admirer said “May you live one thousand years,” you answered “I look forward happily to my death.” What did you mean by that?

  BORGES: I mean that when I’m unhappy—and that happens quite often to all of us—I find a real consolation in the thought that in a few years, or maybe in a few days, I’ll be dead and then all this won’t matter. I look forward to being blotted out. But if I thought that my death was a mere illusion, that after death I would go on, then I would feel very, very unhappy. For, really, I’m sick and tired of myself. Now, of course if I go on and I have no personal memory of ever having been Borges, then in that case it won’t matter to me because I may have been hundreds of odd people before I was born, but those things won’t worry me, since I will have forgotten them. When I think of mortality, of death, I think of those things in a hopeful way, in an expectant way. I should say I am greedy for death, that I want to stop waking up every morning, finding: Well, here I am, I have to go back to Borges.

  There’s a word in Spanish, I suppose you know. I wonder if it’s any longer in use. Instead of saying “to wake up,” you say recordarse, that is, to record yourself, to remember yourself. My mother used to say Que me recuerde a las ocho “I want to be recorded to myself at eight.” Every morning I get that feeling because I am more or less nonexistent. Then when I wake up, I always feel I’m being let down. Because, well, here I am. Here’s the same old stupid game going on. I have to be somebody. I have to be exactly that somebody. I have certain commitments. One of the commitments is to live through the whole day. Then I see all that routine before me, and all things naturally make me tired. Of course when you’re young, you don’t feel that way. You feel, well, I am so glad I’m back in this marvelous world. But I don’t think I ever felt that way. Even when I was young. Especially when I was young. Now I have resignation. Now I wake up and I say: I have to face another day. I let it go at that. I suppose that people feel in different ways because many people think of immortality as a kind of happiness, perhaps because they don’t realize it.

  BARNSTONE: They don’t realize what?

  BORGES: The fact that going on and on would be, let’s say, awful.

  BARNSTONE: Would be another hell, as you say in one of your stories.

  BORGES: Yes, it would be, yes. Since this life is already hell, why go in for more and more hell, for larger and larger doses!

  BARNSTONE: For two hundred years?

  BORGES: Yes. Well, of course you might say that those two hundred years don’t exist. For what really exists is the present moment. The present moment is being weighted down by the past and by the fear of the future. Really, when do we speak of the present moment? For the present moment is as much an abstraction as the past or the future. In the present moment, you always have some kind of past and some kind of future also. You are slipping all the time from one to the other.

  BARNSTONE: But obviously you have great moments of pleasure during your life.

  BORGES: Yes, I suppose everybody has. But I wonder. I suppose those moments are perhaps finer when you remember them. Because when you’re happy, you’re hardly conscious of things. The fact of being conscious makes for unhappiness.

  BARNSTONE: To be conscious of happiness often lets in an intrusion of doubt.

  BORGES: But I think I have known moments of happiness. I suppose all men have. There are moments, let’s say, love, riding, swimming, talking to a friend, let’s say, conversation, reading, even writing, or rather, not writing but inventing something. When you sit down to write it, then you are no longer happy because you’re worried by technical problems. But when you think out something, then I suppose you may be allowed to be happy. And there are moments when you’re slipping into sleep, and then you feel happy, or at least I do. I remember the first time I had sleeping pills. (They were efficient, of course, since they were new to me.) I used to say to myself: Now hearing that tramway turn around the corner, I won’t be able to hear the end of the noise it makes, the rumble, because I’ll be asleep. Then I felt very, very happy. I thought of unconsciousness.

  BARNSTONE: Do you care about literary recognition? Do you want fame?

  BORGES: No. No! Those things are nonexistent. At the same time, when it comes to me—and it may have come to me—I feel that I should be grateful. I mean if people take me seriously, I think, well, they are wrong. At the same time I should be thankful to them.

  BARNSTONE: Do you live for the next poem, story, or essay or conversation?

  BORGES: Yes. Yes, I do.

  BARNSTONE: It seems to me that you’re a lucky man to have unending obsessions to create and to record. Do you know why you had that destiny of being a writer? That destiny or that obsession?

  BORGES: The only thing I know is that I need those obsessions. Because if not, why should I go on living? Of course I wouldn’t commit suicide. But I should feel very unjustified. This doesn’t mean I think very much of what I write. It means that I have to write. Because if I don’t write something and keep on being obsessed by it, then I have to write it and be rid of it.

  BARNSTONE: In the Republic, Plato spends much time seeking a definition of justice, a kind of public definition. Is this notion valid to us personally? Is your life, which ends in death, a just experiment in life, or is it a biological doublecross against both the mind and the body? Plato speaks about public justice. Given the fact of death, do you believe in private justice?

  BORGES: I think that the only justice is private justic
e because, as to a public justice, I wonder if that really exists.

  BARNSTONE: Do you believe private justice exists? How do we consider morality and doomsday?

  BORGES: At the very moment of our lives we know whether we’re acting the right way or the wrong way. We might say that doomsday is going on all the time, that every moment of our lives we’re acting wrongly or rightly. Doomsday is not something that comes at the end. It’s going on all the time. And we know, through some instinct, when we have acted rightly or wrongly.

  BARNSTONE: Is there a biological treason in life because of death?

  BORGES: I don’t understand what you mean by biological doublecross. Biology sounds so dim to me, I wonder if I can take that word in, no?

  BARNSTONE: Physical, then.

  BORGES: Well, physical, yes. I think I can understand that. I am a very simpleminded man. If you go in for those long fancy words, biology and psychology—

  BARNSTONE: We get into language that your father might have used, right?

  BORGES: Yes, he might have used it, but he rarely did so, being a professor of psychology, a skeptic also.

  BARNSTONE: I spent one year of my life, when I was a student, seeking the center of consciousness. I never found it.

  BORGES: I don’t think you can. It keeps eluding you all the time.

  BARNSTONE: But I did discover that seeking oneself was fascinating and intolerable.

  BORGES: Yes, it is. Of course since I am blind, I have to do that more or less all the time. Before I went blind, I was always finding refuge in watching things, seeing things, in reading, while now I have to go in for thinking or, since my thinking capacity isn’t too good, let’s say for dreaming, and in a sense for dreaming away my life. That’s the only thing I can do. Then of course I have to go in for long spells of loneliness, but I don’t mind that. Before, I couldn’t. Before, I remember I lived in a town called Adrogué south of Buenos Aires. When I went on a half hour’s journey and I had no book with me I felt very unhappy. But now I can spend hours and hours on end, with no books, because I don’t read them. And so I don’t think of loneliness as being necessarily unhappy. Or, for example, if I get a spell of insomnia, I don’t mind about it because time slips down. It’s like an easy slope, no? So I just let myself go on living. Now, when I was not blind, I always had to be furnishing my time with different things. Now I don’t. I just let myself go.

  BARNSTONE: Yet you do very much enjoy all the times you are with others.

  BORGES: But of course, I live in memory. And I suppose a poet should live in memory because, after all, what is imagination? Imagination, I should say, is made of memory and of oblivion. It is a kind of blending of the two things.

  BARNSTONE: You manage with time?

  BORGES: Oh yes. Everybody who goes blind gets a kind of reward: a different sense of time. Time is no longer to be filled in at every moment by something. No. You know that you have just to live on, to let time live you. That makes for a certain comfort. I think it is a great comfort, or perhaps a great reward. A gift of blindness is that you feel time in a different way from most people, no? You have to remember and you have to forget. You shouldn’t remember everything because, well, the character I wrote about, Funes, goes mad because his memory is endless. Of course if you forgot everything, you would no longer exist. Because you exist in your past. Otherwise you wouldn’t even know who you were, what your name was. You should go in for a blending of the two elements, no? Memory and oblivion, and we call that imagination. That’s a high-sounding name.

  BARNSTONE: I know you don’t go in for high-sounding words because you’re a literary man.

  BORGES: No, because I am too skeptical about words. A literary man hardly believes in words.

  BARNSTONE: To return to my original question: As I attempted to discover myself, it was fascinating and intolerable because the more profoundly I thought I had gone into myself, the more I disappeared until I was uncertain of everything, even of my own existence.

  BORGES: Well, I think Hume said, when I’ve looked for myself I have never found anybody at home. That’s the way the world is.

  BARNSTONE: One goes from reverie to nightmare.

  BORGES: I have a nightmare almost every night. I had one this morning. But it wasn’t a real nightmare.

  BARNSTONE: What was it?

  BORGES: It was this: I found myself in a very large building. It was a brick building. Many empty rooms. Large empty rooms. Brick rooms. Then I went from one to the other, and there seemed to be no doors. I was always finding my way into courtyards. Then after a time I was going up and down, I was calling out, and there was nobody. That large and unimaginative building was empty, and I said to myself: Why, of course, this is the dream of the maze. So I won’t find any door, so I’ll just have to sit down in one of the rooms and then wait. And sometimes I wake up. And that actually happened. When I realized it and said, this is the nightmare of the maze, and since I knew all about it, I wasn’t taken in by the maze. I merely sat down on the floor.

  BARNSTONE: And waited it out.

  BORGES: I waited a moment and woke up.

  BARNSTONE: You have other recurrent nightmares? What are they?

  BORGES: I have two or three. At this moment I think the maze is the one that comes back to me. Then I have another one, and that came out of my blindness. That is a nightmare of trying to read and of being unable to because the characters become alive, because every letter turns into other letters, and then the words at the beginning are short when I try to make them out. They are long Dutch words with repeated vowels. Or, if not, the spaces between the lines widen out, and then the letters are branching out, and all that is done in black or red characters, on very glossy paper, and so large as to be intolerable. And when I wake up, those characters keep me company for some time. Then for a wild moment I think: I’ll never be able to forget them and I’ll go mad. That seems to be happening all the time. Especially after I lost my sight, I was having that dream of reading, of being unable to read because of the characters becoming alive. That is one of the dreams I have. And the others are dreams about mirrors, about masked people. I suppose I have three essential nightmares: the maze, the writing, and the mirrors. And then there are others that are more or less common to everybody, but those are my three recurrent nightmares. I have them almost every night. They stay with me for a minute or so after I’m awake. Sometimes they come before I’m quite asleep. Most people dream before going to sleep, and then they keep on dreaming a moment after they awake. They are in a kind of halfway house, no? Between waking and sleeping.

  BARNSTONE: It’s also a place from which you gather much material for your writing, isn’t it?

  BORGES: Yes, it is. De Quincey and so on. There is a fine literary tradition to that. De Quincey must have worked out his nightmares when he wrote them down, no? Because they’re so fine. Besides, they depend on words also. While nightmares, generally, don’t depend on words. What’s difficult about writing a nightmare is that the nightmare feeling does not come from the images. Rather, as Coleridge said, the feeling gives you the images.

  BARNSTONE: That’s a major distinction, because most people think the opposite. They don’t think it all through.

  BORGES: When you write down the images, those images may not mean anything to you. It’s what you get in the case of Poe and of Lovecraft. The images are awful but the feeling isn’t awful.

  BARNSTONE: And I suppose a good writer is one who comes up with the right images to correspond to the feeling.

  BORGES: To a feeling, yes. Or who may give you the nightmare feeling with common objects or things. I remember how I found a proof of that in Chesterton. He says that we might think that at the end of the world there is a tree whose very shape is evil. Now that’s a fine word, and I think that stands for that kind of feeling, no? Now, that tree could hardly be described. While, if you think of a tree, for example, made of skulls, of ghosts, that would be quite silly. But what we said, a tree whose very shape is
evil. That shows he really had a nightmare about that tree. No? If not, how would he know about that tree?

  BARNSTONE: I’ve always been puzzled why my tongue moves, why words come out of my mouth or from in my head. These words are like seconds of a clock, happening, sounding almost by themselves.

  BORGES: But I think that before going to sleep you begin, at least I begin, to mumble meaningless sentences. And then I know that I am going to sleep. When I hear myself, when I overhear myself saying something meaningless, it’s a good sign that I’ll be asleep in a moment.

  BARNSTONE: Well, I was going to ask you, about the words happening, forming in our mouths. As long as time exists, the words come. Hence also the thoughts. But I don’t will those words, or even will to will them. They possess me.

  BORGES: I don’t think those words stand for any meaning. At least you don’t know the meaning.

  BARNSTONE: I don’t mean the words before one sleeps. I mean all the words that are coming to you right this moment or to me. In other words, I don’t know why words are coming out of my mouth right now. Some force is letting them out. I am never there manipulating them. I don’t understand that. It’s a kind of fundamental mystery to me.

  BORGES: But I suppose those words go with certain thoughts. But otherwise they would be meaningless or irrelevant.

  BARNSTONE: But I feel like a clock wound up in which the seconds tick, in which words come. I have no idea why I’m speaking to you in any half logical way now. Or why you’re answering me. It’s a tremendous puzzle to me.