Reading a book for two people makes one lament that one reads too little. These two people, one is Qian Zhongshu and the other is Borges. Throughout the ages, there have been tens of millions of polymaths, and few people have displayed martial arts so grandly and dazzlingly like them. Yet reading, like everything in the world, is a double-edged sword. People who read a lot of books are deeply aware of things, and they are wise because of reason, but unfortunately this wisdom cannot be implemented in real situations, and whenever they encounter difficulties, they are often helpless. As the saying goes, nerds can't build a life. The nerd is like the French poet Baudelaire's albatross, the king of the clouds, once banished to the ground, the huge wings hinder it from walking. Mr. Qian is different from Borges, Mr. Qian is not a nerd, Mr. Qian is a wise man. Osawa Xuanhuang, the times have changed, Mr. Qian and his wife have joined hands, all the way to the thrilling road, so that the descendants who admire him are all happy for him. What about Borges? Although coups in South American countries are as common as ants moving houses, he was just lucky. Borges was politically clear and hated Perón, signing a manifesto against Perón. Perón came to power, of course, not sparing him. So a few months later, the famous writer was dismissed from his position in the library and replaced by a poultry and rabbit inspector at the Córdoba Street Market. However, although Perón was born in the military, dancing knives and guns was a proper profession, he did not move a single cold hair of Borges. Letting him inspect the rabbit is humiliating, but it is more like a joke, just like Zhang Shicheng locked Ni Yunlin, who has a clean habit, on the toilet, with a little black humor, it is not like persecution, but a good story.
Borges did not have to be wise to live well, and the older he was, the more famous he became, and he lived to be eighty-seven years old, and he was well-known all over the world. Favorable circumstances enabled him to maintain a complete personality and sense of humor until he was old, and he did not have to study xikun style, go around in circles ruggedly and clumsily, or like Lu Xun, self-deprecating and sneering. However, after reading his works, including a large number of conversations, we find that behind the incomparable wisdom, humor, and profundity, Borges is actually a less happy person. Anxiety haunted him all his life, and he struggled all his life to get rid of these anxieties, and it was not until shortly before his death that he liberated himself in a metaphysical way.
One Western scholar said that Borges's penchant for quoting Achilles' paradox about not being able to catch up with the turtle clearly revealed his lifelong anxiety that man could never achieve his goals. Specifically in Borges's case, the goal can be reduced to two, one is a literary career, and the other is married life.
Borges reminds us of the genius pianist in the movie The Pianist of the Sea in 1900. 1900 had lived on a cruise ship all his life, and he could not imagine a world outside the cruise ship, let alone walk in it. When the luxury cruise ship that was behind the trend of the times was finally about to be destroyed, he chose to die with the cruise ship to the bottom of the sea.
Borges has a wide range of hobbies, makes many friends, his mother accompanies him, takes care of him, friends help him, and his career echoes with each other until his twilight years, and maria Kodama, a junior, is his loyal secretary, and he is actually like a fish in the water in the real world. He is sensitive, sometimes impatient, and if he withdraws his teeth to vent his hatred after a loss of love, he is quite childish, but he is generally a very rational person. In addition to his superb artistic talents, on the surface, he has little resemblance to the 1900s, but if you look closely at their relationship with reality, despite the differences in degrees, they are spiritually compatible.
The sea pianist is powerless to cope with reality and can only live in his own small world. Borges is in the real world, and he has never been separated from it, but only in the ivory tower of the book can he feel heavenly. He famously said of fantasy literature: "All literature is essentially fantasy. Fantasy literature is not an escape from reality, but rather helps us to understand reality in deeper and more complex ways. In the short story "The Utopia of a Weary Man," he borrows the words of the characters and says, "Now we don't talk about facts." Now no one cares about facts, they are only the starting point of fiction and reasoning. Borges said more than once that if there was a heaven, it should be what the library looked like.
He subscribed to the Scottish philosopher Bakeley that the objective existence of all things is not important, what is important is perceived, and only what is perceived is meaningful existence. Thus, Borges valued fantasy, dreams and all metaphysics more than reality. Since everything is our perception, what is the certainty of things? In the end, our own existence, and the world we know, but like a dream, as Zhuangzi said, we don't know whether we dream of becoming butterflies or butterflies dreaming of becoming us. We think we wake up from a dream, and it is likely that we have returned from one dream to another. Zhuangzi and Liezi talk about dreams, exhausting the possibilities of dreams, but Borges insists on going one step further: creating reality through dreams. To understand Borges, the short story "Circular Ruins" is a key.
The famous "Tron, Ukbar, Orbister Tius" writes that a group of people have fictionalized a planetary world through the compilation of an encyclopedia, including nationalities, history, politics, religion, culture, geography, species, architecture, climate, etc., all in detail. In Tron, all things "exist by man's mind, disappear by man's oblivion, and arise from man's fantasies." What is even more amazing is that at the end of the novel, this purely fictional world of Tron slowly invades the earth and changes the reality of the earth.
On the same theme, "Round Ruins" is more concise than "Tron", but also more in-depth and more essential. Borges was inspired by Carol Lewis's Adventures in the Mirror of Alice, in which one of the twins, Tivedo, mocks Alice, saying that she is nothing more than something in the king's dream, "If he no longer dreams of you, where do you think you will be?" Not anywhere. You will disappear like an extinguished candle. ”
The magician in The Circular Ruins creates a son for himself in a dream, who is also his heir. His only purpose when he reached the circular ruins was to keep dreaming, "to dream of that person without any discomfort and make it a reality." Borges, in the nuanced details of Kafka's Cave of the Earth, describes how a magician creates a flesh-and-blood man out of chaos and nothingness. He first dreamed of a circular theater, "black and oppressively filled with silent students", and after ten days of teaching, he finally found a silent and melancholy child, and then he disbanded the other children, leaving only this one, and began to transform the child from a hazy phantom into a physical reality. He dreamed of the child's secret heart, then the various organs, and within a year, the work reached the bones and eyelids, and finally the most difficult hair.
The child is physically formed, and he teaches him knowledge, and makes him familiar with reality until he is able to act, to be able to replace him, to go to another abandoned temple. Soon, the son succeeded, and people began to preach his magic, including passing through the flames unscathed.
The magician became worried. He thought that the only God in the world who appeared in the form of fire knew that his son was an illusion, and he was worried that his son would think of his own qualities of not being afraid of fire, and thus find himself "just an illusion, not a person, but a projection of another man's dream. ”
Borges was almost never married, but only in the year of his death did he marry Maria Kodama, who had been with him for many years, and died two months later. Borges was a complete loser of love, both as a matter of character and with the fact that his father took him to a brothel for sexual initiation at a young age, which led to his lifelong fear of sex. For this reason, Borges had no children. His regret about this is not much expressed here in the text, but occasionally when it is involved, he can't help it, which shows the depth of his remorse. In his later work, The Other Man, Borges, in his seventies, meets a young man in his twenties on the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge, and after a conversation, discovers that this young man is exactly who he was decades ago. The novel reads: "I have no children, and I feel a longing for this poor young man, and I feel that he is more gracious than my own son." ”
The infinite affection in it is reminiscent of the equally lifelong unmarried British essayist Charles. Lamb. In Children of Dreams, Lamb meticulously describes his story of the family's past for a hypothetical son and daughter. Lamb loves a girl, Alice, who later marries someone else. The sons and daughters that Lamb dreamed of were born to Alice. At the end of the article, the two small children gradually blurred and faded into the distance, and the author seemed to hear them say: "We are not your children, nor Alice's children, we are just hallucinations in dreams..." At this point in the article, I can't help but feel helpless. Borges must have been more affectionate, and his related works probably arose or inspired him.
Borges also wrote a sonnet, "To the Son." He said that from ancient times to the future, man, his son, his son's son, constitutes an endless stretch, and everyone is a passer-by in time and a part of eternity.
Without a son, the chain of eternity is broken.
From "The Round Ruins" to "The Other Man", the time span is thirty years. Both novels write dreams, in which he created his own son with his own hands, and in the latter he regarded his young self, long annihilated in the river of time, as his son. What an obsession this is.
At the end of "Round Ruins", the ruins are set on fire, and the magician walks into the flames, and in a moment understands: he is not a person, but only an illusion, an illusion in another person's dream.
Reality is denied, and therefore it is taken for granted that the flaws and regrets left behind in reality are also denied, and fantasy becomes a better alternative, if not perfect. This is the indisputable A-Q-style victory of the wise.
The nightmarish fear of sex was also gently dissipated in the late Age of Ulrika. Borges incarnated as Javier, a professor of literature from Colombia, meets the idyllic and mysterious Nordic girl Urrika (the incarnation of Maria Kodama), and they go from acquaintance to love, and finally in an ancient room, and lie on the bed, at this time, Borges writes this confession in a rare almost sensational tone:
"There is no steel sword between the two of us. Time passes like grains of sand in an hourglass. The love of the earth rippled in the shadows, and I possessed the image of Urrica's flesh for the first and last time. ”
This passage from Borges in The Other Man is the best summary of his life:
"The responsibility of perfection is to accept dreams, just as we have accepted the universe and acknowledged that we were born in this world, that we can see with our eyes, that we can breathe."
Author: Zhang Zongzi
Planner: Chen Xihan
Editor: Xu Luming
Editor-in-Charge: Shao Ling
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.