Borges in his short story “Kafka and his Precursors” makes the point that as he came to read more of Kafka, he could ‘recognise his voice, or his practices, in texts from diverse literatures and periods’. Borges lists Zeno, Han Yu, Kierkegaard, Browning Léon Bloy, and Lord Dunsany
Emil Cioran (1911-1995) poet and prophet of pessimism, an existentialist, but one who abhorred meaning-making, whose philosophy focused on the tragic and meaningless, the despair in existence. He wrote ‘I have seen one man pursue his goal, another that one; I have seen men fascinated by disparate objects, under the spell of dreams and plans…
An imaginary being, an ancient text by al-Jahiz and translated by Miguel Asin Palacios and related to us by Borges and sent onwards on its journey by me. An accumulation of preposterous imaginings over space and time, an accretion some might say but no less alive for that and infused with vitality in the retelling.
‘…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province’
This morning I am sitting in the Birmingham Central Library, surrounded by books. As you come up, by the escalator, to the second floor you see ahead of you, a circular atrium that towers above you and that is open to a magnificent light coming from the sky. There are circular rows and rows of…
MindReadings 