Fractionals

I've been enjoying Borges' Labyrinths so much that when I was at the Bookshelf tonight I picked up his Collected Fictions, which has everything Labyrinths has plus... well, everything else, I suppose.

I love that he never wrote novels. I read "The Secret Miracle" as a child (I have no idea where I found it), and I love that even now it retains the vivacity and force of a waking dream. Borges' fictions are perfect for reading over and over, both because of their brevity and for the way they focus the mind on the powerfully unreal. As you get to know the fictions they only seem more inevitable, more obvious. In a lesser writer the experience of reading them all piled up together would be draining on your suspended disbelief but for Borges all those un-sudden twists at the end merely reinforce his themes, his images and his philosophy. The world seems more real when you're done reading Borges, but it also seems different.

And I love that he's so quotable. Here's a recent favourite, from "The Wall And The Books":

Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain times try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this immanence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.