I don’t have a girl friend, not even one who’s better than that, but I’ve got Borges, and he’s telling me with every page he writes that I need to stop making sense. Okay, Jorge. It’s hard, but I’ll try. In 1914, World War I was breaking out in Europe. This might seem like a really awkward shift in what I’m talking about, but bear with me. We don’t think much about World War I, the one people of its time called the Great War, the War to End All Wars. We should. We don’t have to go any further than Wikipedia to find out it was the sixth deadliest war in human history with a body count of over nine million. Of course, if we’re going to Wikipedia for information, we need to face the possibility that World War I might have been the third deadliest war, or the sixteenth. You just can’t ever tell with Wiki – don’t ever use me in a research paper – pedia. And, also, the sixth deadliest in human history? What other kind of history are we talking about? In 1914, just as the umpteenth deadly war was getting started, Borges and his family moved to Switzerland. I read somewhere – and didn’t make a note of it for the works cited page that I’m not going to write – that the family Borges went to Europe to escape political unrest at home in Argentina. Really? I’m thinking that of the two areas of unrest, I’d take Argentina over a World War. They didn’t. Maybe not making sense made sense to Borges from early on. He was fifteen, an age when your parents can still be right for the most part, so he probably didn’t question the insanity of what they were doing. When I was fifteen, my father’s view of the world was absolute, never to be questioned or challenged. At that time, Daddy had quit work and come home to sit at the kitchen table, smoking, drinking iced water, and checking every weather report he could find. He stayed like that for the next twenty years. It made perfect sense to me. Then. Borge’s daddy had actually gone to Switzerland because he needed to see an eye doctor. Switzerland has great eye doctors, I guess. Not that it did him any good. Borges watched his father go blind, and later he watched himself do the same. That’s funny in an awful sort of way. He watched himself go blind. Get it? In 1955, he became the director of the National Public Library in Buenos Aires. The irony of becoming a librarian as he was losing his sight was not lost on him. He wrote, No one should read self-pity or reproach Into this statement of the majesty
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