Writing while missing the color red

Born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges, like all geniuses, began fulfilling his destiny very early. At four, he already knew how to read and write; at six, he composed his first story, The Fatal Visor, inspired by pages from Don Quixote; the following year, he drafted an essay on Greek mythology in English, and at nine, he translated Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince .

Needless to say, he never stopped, and his work is fundamental to contemporary literature and thought, so much so that it transcends any classification, excludes all dogma, and resists all criticism. And it continues to arouse the same temptations: to imitate him, to find some secret in him, to read him from cover to cover, to know everything about his life and work, to memorize his poetry, and even to completely and purposely ignore him. But the truth, dear reader, is that few voices are as valuable as his.

So much has been said about Borges that there are many excuses to justify ignorance or indifference toward his work ("it's very complicated," "I'm not interested in poetry," "reading puts me to sleep," "I hate Argentinians"), but the truth is that he provokes a combination of fear, indolence, and the most foolish and ferocious laziness.

However, I assure you that when you approach Borges, things that were once terrifying will acquire beauty. Tigers, mirrors, and labyrinths will no longer be threatening. References to cultures in other languages won't be either, and it won't be difficult for you to fall in love with your loved ones as well. You will possibly share with him his supreme poetic image: that the closest thing to paradise is a library (and perhaps because of that, the closest thing to hell is someone who never finishes a book).

It is perhaps Augusto Monterroso, in his book Perpetual Movement who best described the encounter with Jorge Luis Borges:

“When I discovered Borges, in 1945, I didn't understand him, and rather, he shocked me. Searching for Kafka, I found his prologue to The Metamorphosis , and for the first time I was confronted by his world of metaphysical labyrinths, of infinities, of eternities, of tragic trivialities, of domestic relationships comparable to the best-imagined hell. A new universe, dazzling and fiercely attractive. Moving from that prologue to everything from Borges has been for me (and for so many others) something as necessary as breathing, and at the same time as dangerous as coming too close to an abyss.”

There were those who said that, if Paradise were a library, the first book on the first shelf would be The Aleph —one of Borges's most illustrious works—because in addition to being the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, its symbol indicated the reunion of all that exists, a mirror that reflects everything. The key to understanding the entire Universe in 145 pages.

Borges, in this regard, was indifferent. He considered the act of naming things with words insufficient, because "the whole" was unfathomable: "If anything, we can only make partial reports," he once said. So one wonders: why does Borges achieve such perfect conflations of words in his stories, poems, and essays? How is it that, being blind, he describes so many lights and nuances? (There's no need to think about it too much, dear reader, much less during the rainy season. We should run out and find it to celebrate his birthday by reading it next Sunday.)

It was not in a text, but in a lecture where Borges spoke about the subject and said:

“In the course of my many, my too many lectures, I have observed that the personal is preferred to the general; the concrete to the abstract. Therefore, I will begin by referring to my modest personal blindness. Modest, first of all, because it is total blindness in one eye, partial blindness in the other. I can still decipher some colors; I can still decipher green, I can decipher blue. Above all, there is one color that has not been unfaithful to me, that has been loyal to me, that has always accompanied me, and that is the color yellow. I remember that as a child (if my sister is here, she will remember this too), I would linger in front of one of the cages in the zoo in Palermo, and it was precisely the cage of the tiger and the leopard. I remember that I would linger in front of the gold and black of the tiger until dusk, and even now, yellow continues to accompany me. And I have written a poem entitled 'The Gold of Tigers' in which I speak of this friendship of yellow with me, just as yellow has always been with me. Precisely, one of the colors that blind people (or at least this blind person) miss is black and red. Those are the colors we're missing. I, who used to sleep in complete darkness, was bothered for a long time by having to sleep in that foggy, greenish-blue, vaguely luminous world that is the world of the blind.

They say that when the lecture ended, someone heard the writer say, "Hell and heaven seem disproportionate to me. The actions of men don't deserve so much." And then he left to continue writing.