Borges and I : Jorge Luis Borges

 BORGES and I 

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago, I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

~ Jorge Luis Borges (1899~1986)

The Shortest Stories

(Photo : Selvan)

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When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.

(Augusto Monterroso)

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For Sale : Baby shoes, never worn.

(Ernest Hemingway)

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God said, 'Cancel Program GENESIS'. 

The universe ceased to exist.

(Arthur C Clarke)

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The Little Prince ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

It was then that the fox appeared.

"Good morning," said the fox.

"Good morning," the little prince responded politely, although when he turned around he saw nothing.

"I am right here," the voice said, "under the apple tree."

"Who are you?" asked the little prince, and added, "You are very pretty to look at."

"I am a fox," said the fox.

"Come and play with me," proposed the little prince. "I am so unhappy."


"I cannot play with you," the fox said. "I am not tamed."

"Ah! Please excuse me," said the little prince.

But, after some thought, he added:

"What does that mean-- 'tame'?"

"You do not live here," said the fox. "What is it that you are looking for?"

"I am looking for men," said the little prince. "What does that mean-- 'tame'?"

"Men," said the fox. "They have guns, and they hunt. It is very disturbing. They also raise chickens. These are their only interests. Are you looking for chickens?"

"No," said the little prince. "I am looking for friends. What does that mean-- 'tame'?"

"It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties."


"'To establish ties'?"


"Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world..."

"I am beginning to understand," said the little prince. "There is a flower... I think that she has tamed me..."

"It is possible," said the fox. "On the Earth one sees all sorts of things."

"Oh, but this is not on the Earth!" said the little prince.

The fox seemed perplexed, and very curious.

"On another planet?"

"Yes."

"Are there hunters on this planet?"

"No."

"Ah, that is interesting! Are there chickens?"

"No."

"Nothing is perfect," sighed the fox.

But he came back to his idea.

"My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life . I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat..."


The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.

"Please-- tame me!" he said.

"I want to, very much," the little prince replied. "But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand."

"One only understands the things that one tames," said the fox. "Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me..."

"What must I do, to tame you?" asked the little prince.

"You must be very patient," replied the fox. "First you will sit down at a little distance from me-- like that-- in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day..."



The next day the little prince came back.

"It would have been better to come back at the same hour," said the fox. "If, for example, you come at four o'clock in the afternoon, then at three o'clock I shall begin to be happy. I shall feel happier and happier as the hour advances. At four o'clock, I shall already be worrying and jumping about. I shall show you how happy I am! But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you... One must observe the proper rites..."

"What is a rite?" asked the little prince.

"Those also are actions too often neglected," said the fox. "They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours. There is a rite, for example, among my hunters. Every Thursday they dance with the village girls. So Thursday is a wonderful day for me! I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters danced at just any time, every day would be like every other day, and I should never have any vacation at all."

So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near--

"Ah," said the fox, "I shall cry."

"It is your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you..."


"Yes, that is so," said the fox.

"But now you are going to cry!" said the little prince.

"Yes, that is so," said the fox.

"Then it has done you no good at all!"

"It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat fields." And then he added:

"Go and look again at the roses. You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world. Then come back to say goodbye to me, and I will make you a present of a secret."

The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.

"You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."

And the roses were very much embarrassed.

"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you-- the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.."


And he went back to meet the fox.

"Goodbye," he said.


"Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

"What is essential is invisible to the eye," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

"It is the time you have shared for your rose that makes your rose so important."

"It is the time I have shared for my rose--" said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.

"Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose..."

"I am responsible for my rose," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

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~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery : The Little Prince


(Chapter : 21 : The Little Prince And The Fox)


Translated By : Katherine Woods


Illustrated By : Antoine de Saint-Exupery


First Published in 1943



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The Art Of Listening : The Paris Review Interviews

"I have known many poets here who have written well - very fine stuff - with delicate moods and so on - but if you talk with them, the only thing they tell you is smutty stories or they speak of politics in a way that everybody does, so that really their writing turns out to be a kind of sideshow. They had learned writing in the way that a man might learn to play chess or to play bridge. They were really not poets or writers at all. It was a trick they had learned, and they had learned it thoroughly. They had the whole thing at their finger ends. But most of them - except four or five, I should say - seemed to think of life as having nothing poetic or mysterious about it. They take things for granted.."

~ Jorge Luis Borges

in his interview to Ronald Christ in 1967 (from 'The Paris Review Interviews' Volume I, 2006, Picador, New York)

It is very difficult to take an Interview of anyone. More so if the other person is a writer, an artist, a singer or a dancer. It requires tremendous intelligence and a lot of hard work to study the body of work of the person being interviewed. And above all, one must cultivate the art of listening.

The art of listening has become a rare feat these days, that one is really scared whether the human ear is very soon going to become a completely vestigial organ of the body. May be as a sign of this degenerative evolution, the pinna has already become static. Just imagine, how cute it will be to look at, if the pinna of the human ear starts moving everytime we listen keenly to the other person!

All animals must be keen to listen to each other. Have you observed how the ears of a dog will swirl, even if they are sleeping, the moment they hear a hiss? They will never open their eyes first. It is the folly of the human mind to think that the most beautiful creature of this Universe - the Elephant - keeps on moving its ears to avoid ants from entering into them. How reductive. The Elephant actually wants to listen to everything every organism in this world thinks and feels. And bless them. Just b'coz we are deaf to this, there is so much sadness in the eyes of all the tamed elephants. It makes me cry.

'The Paris Review Interviews' are a rare collection of interviews which were published in the world's most respected literary magazine The Paris Review. The Paris Review is being published quarterly from New York (not Paris!) since 1953. They have so far brought out 4 volumes of 16 interviews each. Each interview is elaborate and detailed that one gets a comprehensive slice of the persona of our cherised literary masters.

I've bought only the first three Volumes @ Landmark, my favourite place to hang-out in Infiniti Mall, Andheri West, Mumbai and have placed the order for the fourth one which is yet to be delivered.

Some of the most lovely interviews which i relished are that of T.S.Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene, William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez from the first two volumes. There are many names in the first two volumes about whom i have not even heard of. Am yet to read the third volume which has the interviews of William Carlos Williams, Harold Pinter, Raymond Carver, Chinua Achebe, Ted Hughes, Salman Rushdie and Norman Mailer to name a few. And am yet to know about the fourth volume.

They are not only the ideal models of how an interview must be taken and given. But they also throw light into the innumerable possibilities that can emerge out of a beautiful human conversation.

If only we are bestowed with those listening ears..