Borges

As of recent, I have been time and time again recommended to read Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine writer with whom i had previously been unaware. I decided that I might as well pick up a collection of his fiction and read--in order to separate myself from the sea of thematic waves that this class an others have dragged me by in inescapable tidal currents-- Borges however, is yet another tsunami.
One though, that I am happy if not elated to surf. I actually, am somewhat convinced that I would like to write my paper incorporating his works, if not focusing on them.
To give you just an idea of how central his writing is to the themes we sit atop, here are just a few (of inumerous) passages that are a distillation of assigned texts.

--These are all from his short story collection entitled the Aleph--

opening the collection, in quoting an essay by Francis Bacon, Borges cites,
"Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth.
So that as Plato had imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.

'Nine doors opened to into that cellar-like place; eight led to a maze that retunred, deceitfully to the same chamber; the ninth led through another maze to a second chamber identical to the first (187)"

"I felt that it had existed before human kind, before the world itself. Its pattern antiquity (though somehow terrible to the eyes) seemed to accord with the labor of immortal artificers. (1879)"

"We accept reality so readily--perhaps because we sense that nothing is real (190)"

now in conversation with the dog Argos:
" I asked Argos how much of the Odyssey he knew. He found using Greek difficult; I had to repeat the question.
Very little, he replied. Less than the megerest rhapsode. It has been eleven hundred years since i last wrote it.

"No one is someone; a single immortal man is all men. like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, hero, philosopher, demon, and world--which is a long way of saying that i am not. "

"I have been Homer; soon, like Ulysses, I shall be Nobody; soon, I shall be all men--I shall be dead"

"Thus, in 1946, by the grace of his long-held passion, Pedro Damian died in the defeat at Masoller, which took place between the winter and spring of the year 1904"

" I felt, on the last page, that my story was a symbol of the man I had been as I was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I had had to write that story and so on, ad infinitum (And just when i stop believing in him, "Averroes" disappears). 241)

"Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he was trying to say that there is nothing, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of cause and effects"

"Idealist doctrine has it that the verbs "to live" and "to dream" are at every point synonyms; for me, thousands upon thousands of appearances will pass into one; a complex dream into a simple one."

then in discussing this coin, the Zahir over which he obsesses, it consumes him:

"In order to loose themselves in God, the Sufis repeat their own name or the ninety-nine names of God until the names mean nothing anymore. I long to travel that path. Perhaps by thinking about the Zahir unceasingly, I can manage to wear it away; perhaps behind the coin is God. (249)

If any of you have the chance: Read Borges. Purely amazing.
Like Santiago finding that the gears of the world click in his favor; this author fell into my lap, and completed the labyrinth.