Lately, thoughts of loss and absences have been much on my mind. Feeding into these have been the bits and pieces of Heidegger which have started to sink in, hearing about the Japanese aesthetic concept of 'mono no aware' (expressing the connection between our experiences of beauty, sorrow and transience), the 'Nietzsche and the fragment' presentation in the following week's philo honours seminar, the turning of the seasons, and probably several other things, too, not least general melancholy. In light of that, "The Witness", which appears in this slim collection of seven of Borges' short stories, particularly resonated. It's just a fragment, really, a shard from some strange mirror, and its central idea is this: "Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies may make us stop in wonder - and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested."
These themes, though - loss, absence, spaces, infinites - are woven through all of the stories here. They're often unsettling, probably because they expose the gaps yawning just beneath the contingent sets of constructions which we call the world - the one which I found myself most troubled by was "Blue Tigers", in which stones multiply and divide ceaselessly without any regard to order or pattern, a "dreadful miracle" in which the "monstrousness" of the stones proves that the universe can tolerate disorder. Definitely need to read more Borges (and maybe learn how to pronounce his surname somewhere along the line, too).
