Jorge Luis Borges

The Power of the Imagination

I am reading again this Argentine writer so well known for his erudition and creative mind. The ultimate bohemian, he spent most of his career in obscurity, working as a librarian among other things, until he was catapaulted to fame in the 1960's.

His works range from poems mythologizing his beloved city of Buenos Aires to fantastic short stories that are powerful meditations on time, space, and identity. In order to read Borges, you have to have done your homework since everything is fair game for him, from obscure second century Gnostic heresies to the finer points of Argentine history.

Borges was no friend of the Church nor of Christianity. What we can learn from him, however, is how to see things from radically different perspectives, and to realize that no matter how far afield we might go, investigating all things is in reality the investigation of your own soul.

Above is shown Borges' grave in Geneva. On it are inscriptions in old English. His love for the English language stems from his grandmother, who was English, and was to the point that when he finally went blind in his old age, he could still recite large parts of Beowulf from memory.

For more information visit this helpful webpage.