Grief as a pedestal

On the fourteenth of February, I received a telegram from Buenos Aires saying I should return immediately, because my father was ‘in no way well.’ God forgive me, but the prestige of being the recipient of an urgent telegram, the desire to communicate to all of Fray Bentos the contradiction between the negative form of the message and the positive adverb, the temptation to dramatize my sorrow as I feigned a virile stoicism, all no doubt distracted me from all possibility of anguish.

Jorge Borges

Borges’ stories tend to be sterile conjectures about mathematics, gnosticism, etc, and often read like essays. Only the puzzle matters: Apart from revealing his philosophical interests, Borges himself always remains an enigma. In the middle of Funes the Memorious he drops a revealing half-paragraph feels completely human, probably even autobiographical.