Collected Fictions

I cannot remember in which of his many short stories I read it, but the great Argentine writer Jorge Borges put into the mouth of one of his inimitable characters a line that has never left me: “I have often begun the study of metaphysics but have always been interrupted by happiness.” Borges was the master of the unexpected, describing situations no one could have foreseen. I have read everything he wrote and read his stories over and over again. 

The ones I like best deal with bravery and cowardice but also with time and how time can change what… show more.

To fathom the mystery of consciousness, one needs to be ready to violate the entrenched convictions of conventional mindscience and let your mind roam freely over more inventive and limber perspectives.

Such as the literary inventions of Jorge Borges. His short stories/essays (it’s never really clear which category is more appropriate) are all wildly creative and astute models of sentience. I learned more about consciousness from “The Library of Babel,” “Tlön," Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and “The Lottery of Babylon” than I did from any neuroscience text.

Of all of Borges’ work, I chose this one because it contains all his work—of his fiction that is. There is another volume containing a lot of his non-fiction. He was a short story writer, poet, essayist, reviewer, screenplay writer and translator from Old Norse and Anglo Saxon, among other languages. It is hard to add to the litany of praise for this hugely influential and singular author. It is interesting that he never wrote a novel, and also pleasing that his subject matter, which is far from the mainstream has gained near universal recognition.

He examines the Theseus myth… show more.

Time plays an explicit or implicit role in numerous of Borges's texts. Through his essays and fiction, he explores questions such as the possibility of changing the past, the direction of time, Zeno's paradoxes, etc. For me, The Secret Miracle is especially fascinating, since in many ways it offers a concrete manifestation of Bergson's philosophy. The protagonist experiences two different types of time: the internal time of consciousness and the external cosmological time. Through his experiences, we face questions such as: Does each one of us experiences time differently? What is the relation between exterior cosmological time and interior subjective… show more.