Today is the 112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges.

He’s dead, of course, so the celebrations will be a little muted.

My father gave me a copy of his collected stories (he never wrote a novel – just poems, essays, and short stories) many years ago. I confess that I have never read his poetry.

He was certainly a writer’s writer. Or perhaps a reader’s writer.

Yes, he wrote all those stories about gauchos, but it’s all those stories about Casaubon-esque authors, archivists, and librarians trying and ontological inability to contain all the knowledge one desires. Even when a character seemed to achieve something like that goal, the melancholy knowledge that, in life, one couldn’t, hovered over it all.

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
– Borges