Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview Read Free Page A

anything, I’d just be living on, no? Letting time flow or perhaps looking back on memories or walking across a bridge and trying to remember favourite passages, but maybe I wouldn’t be doing anything, I’d just be living. I never understand why people say they’re bored because they have nothing to do. Because sometimes I have nothing whatever to do, and I don’t feel bored. Because I’m not doing things all the time, I’m content.
    BURGIN: You’ve never felt bored in your life?
    BORGES: I don’t think so. Of course, when I had to be ten days lying on my back after an operation I felt anguish, but not boredom.
    BURGIN: You’re a metaphysical writer and yet so many writers like, for example, Jane Austen or Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis, seem to have no real metaphysical feeling at all.
    BORGES: When you speak of Fitzgerald, you’re thinking of Edward Fitzgerald, no? Or Scott Fitzgerald?
    BURGIN: Yes, the latter.
    BORGES: Ah, yes.
    BURGIN: I was just naming a writer who came to mind as having essentially no metaphysical feeling.
    BORGES: He was always on the surface of things, no? After all, why shouldn’t you, no?
    BURGIN: Of course, most people live and die without ever, it seems, really thinking about the problems of time or space or infinity.
    BORGES: Well, because they take the universe for granted. They take things for granted. They take themselves for granted. That’s true. They never wonder at anything, no? They don’t think it’s strange that they should be living. I remember the first time I felt that was when my father said to me, “What a queer thing,” he said, “that I should be living, as they say, behind my eyes, inside my head, I wonder if that makes sense?” And then, it was the first time I felt that, and then instantly I pounced upon that because I knew what he was saying. But many people can hardly understand that. And they say, “Well, but where else could you live?”
    BURGIN: Do you think there’s something in people’s minds that blocks out the sense of the miraculous, something maybe inherent in most human beings that doesn’t allow them to think about these things? Because, after all, if they spent their time thinking about the miracle of the universe, they wouldn’t do the work civilization depends on and nothing, perhaps, would get done.
    BORGES: But I think that today too many things get done.
    BURGIN: Yes, of course.
    BORGES: Sarmiento wrote that he once met a gaucho and the gaucho said to him, “The countryside is so lovely that I don’t want to think about its cause.” That’s very strange, no? It’s a kind of non sequitur, no? Because he should have begun to think about the cause of that beauty. But I suppose he meant that he drank all those things in, and he felt quite happy about them, and he had no use for thinking. But generally speaking, I think men are more prone to metaphysical wondering than women. I think that women take the world for granted. Things for granted. And themselves, no? And circumstances for granted. I think circumstances especially.
    BURGIN: They confront each moment as a separate entity without thinking about all the circumstances that lead up to it.
    BORGES: No, because they think of …
    BURGIN: They take things one at a time.
    BORGES: Yes, they take them one at a time, and then they’re afraid of cutting a poor figure, or they think of themselves as being actresses, no? The whole world looking at them and, of course, admiring them.
    BURGIN: They do seem to be more self-conscious than men on the whole.
    BORGES: I have known very intelligent women who are quite incapable of philosophy. One of the most intelligent women I know, she’s one of my pupils; she studies Old English with me, well, she was wild over so many books and poets, then I told her to read Berkeley’s dialogues, three dialogues, and she could make nothing of them. And then I gave her a book of William James, some problems of philosophy, and she’s a very intelligent