A Dreamer's Notes: Library Night with Borges

What’s missing from Edwin Williamson’s long biography of Jorge Luis Borges (Borges: A Life) are the dreams. There’s mention of an early and recurring nightmare, in which Borges does not know where he is or who he is, a dream that may have anticipated his blindness but extends to his existential condition. There are a couple of references to nightmares in his later years – of being terrified by a dream that oppressed him in a book-lined basement in a professor’s house in East Lansing, so he had to be moved to a hotel; of a terrible dream in which he is crucified and glimpses a she-wolf as his oppressor. But nothing, really, about the dreams that may have inspired and fueled the poems and stories.

Did Borges really dream only on paper? If so, this might account for his uncertainty about whether there is an afterlife, something that weighed on him into his final days. His father – who went blind long before him – sometimes spoke of his longing for death in the sense of being totally “extinguished”. Borges, bitterly and recurringly rejected by women and disappointed in love, and tied to the clumsy body of a failing, eventually sightless animal, also yearned for this, and often thought of suicide. Feeling close to his own death, three years after the death of his boyhood friend from Geneva, Maurice Abramowicz, Borges wrote 

I cannot tell whether you are still someone
I cannot tell whether you can hear me [“Elegy”]

Yet the next year in a Greek taverna in Geneva, when a certain song was playing, Borges experienced an epiphany. The song declared that while the music played, you could enjoy the love of Helen of Troy; while the music played, Ulysses could go home to Ithaca. In this moment, Borges knew that Maurice was alive and present, and raised his glass in a toast to his friend. “Tonight I can weep like a man,” he wrote that same night, “ because I know there is not a single thing on this earth which is mortal and which does not project its shadow. Tonight you have told me without words, Abramowicz, that we should enter death as we might enter a fiesta.” [“Abramowicz” in Los Conjurados]

Borges was now released to imagine – in a burst of visionary optimism after all the black despair – a world created by dreamers. In his prose poem “Someone Shall Dream” (“Alguien sonara”) the future “shall dream dreams more vivid than our waking life today. It shall dream that we can work miracles, and that we won’t carry them out because it will be more real to imagine them. It shall dream worlds so intense that the voice of a single bird could kill us.” 

A Library Date with Borges

I have dreamed of Borges, and these dreams are very much the dreams of a writer and bookman, as you might expect. During a visit to Barcelona, I picked up copies of a couple of Spanish-language editions of books by Borges and his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares and leafed through them on a sunny hotel terrace during siesta time. That night, Borges called me, as he had promised in a previous dream, to his ideal library. In that well-upholstered space, he appeared in his prime, no longer blind, beautifully dressed. He gave me a personal seminar on the art of the short story, drawing on his own experience of writing three drafts of a story. “Each,” he remarked, “had merits and demerits.

The story was "The Secret Miracle", that dark jewel in which a Jewish playwright who has been sentenced to death by a Nazi official in occupied Prague is granted his wish for a year to complete an unfinished play. The world around him is frozen as he spends a year of mental time on this work. When he finds the last word the bullets are released from the barrels of the firing squad. The story contains two remarkable dreams within its own oneiric logic.

“My first draft had the most passion,” Borges told me. “The third was the most technically accomplished. It is essential not to lose the passion in the developing craft.”

Illustration: "Library Date" by RM with AI assistance