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Currently at Toronto Pearson: 26. High today: 34.
I've been reading the Borges Labyrinths collection--I'd say "re-reading", but, on one hand, it feels like that goes without saying, and on the other hand, I'm not sure I've ever read it from cover to cover before. (I will admit that I won't likely get to the back cover this time, either.) Reading a few stories, I start to worry that there's more cleverness than intelligence, but the endings redeem them. Having "Existentialism Is a Humanism" fresh in my mind makes the ending of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" pop out in a different way than it would have the first time I read it: "Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days of the Adrogué hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial." (Sartre: "Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them do so. If so, fascism will then be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be such as men have decided they shall be. Does that mean that I should abandon myself to quietism? No. First I ought to commit myself and then act my commitment, according to the time-honoured formula that 'one need not hope in order to undertake one's work.'" It would have been very shortly after I read "Tlön" for the first time that that passage of Sartre became one of my favourite things to quote.) The ending of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" licenses one to wonder in just what spirit the Borges story means to allegorize on the Sartre essay that would be published only six years later. (It is a relief, I must say, but of course a guilty one, not to find the order reversed.)
Painted lady turns her nose up at you:
I've been reading the Borges Labyrinths collection--I'd say "re-reading", but, on one hand, it feels like that goes without saying, and on the other hand, I'm not sure I've ever read it from cover to cover before. (I will admit that I won't likely get to the back cover this time, either.) Reading a few stories, I start to worry that there's more cleverness than intelligence, but the endings redeem them. Having "Existentialism Is a Humanism" fresh in my mind makes the ending of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" pop out in a different way than it would have the first time I read it: "Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days of the Adrogué hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial." (Sartre: "Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them do so. If so, fascism will then be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be such as men have decided they shall be. Does that mean that I should abandon myself to quietism? No. First I ought to commit myself and then act my commitment, according to the time-honoured formula that 'one need not hope in order to undertake one's work.'" It would have been very shortly after I read "Tlön" for the first time that that passage of Sartre became one of my favourite things to quote.) The ending of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" licenses one to wonder in just what spirit the Borges story means to allegorize on the Sartre essay that would be published only six years later. (It is a relief, I must say, but of course a guilty one, not to find the order reversed.)
Painted lady turns her nose up at you:
