(no subject)

Suddenly (re-?)occurred to me that The Library of Babel must have reflected Borges' fears about his declining vision - flip "I have always thought of paradise as a kind of library" and you have a special version of hell, where the words become gibberish. Maybe a few sad brief approaches to intelligibility here and there - some fragmentary phrase you can almost parse. When he did go blind it wasn't so bad, he just switched to being read to, and to oral composition. But till that renewal this must have been his personal nightmare, one he merely lends to the questing religious.

Hell as a constantly broken promise of paradise.

Unrelated thought of a few minutes later: Grapes of Wrath had an eye on Moby-Dick, which explains some of Blood Meridian's (a much more explicit imitator) curious resemblance to it. Was that the first time it was taken as blueprint for a Great American Novel attempt? Maybe it was a generational thing - the younger modernists were hit by its revival at about the same time Ulysses registered. More of their novels wandered after the latter, but M-D's a clear presence in Absalom, Absalom! and some Hemingway efforts, The Old Man and the Sea most obviously.

(no subject)

An awful lot in Borges reads like the attempts of a godless, countryless, pragmatic, in all other ways literary-philosophical person to sympathize - genuinely so - with the history-making obsessions of the miserable others.

And since that person in each of us spends a lot of its time marveling at everything else that we do, this is consonant enough with his "Borges and I" strain.

(In "Garden," written during and in reaction to the War, he sympathizes even with his/literature's own murderer. He thought of Stephen Albert as Goethe, and he was, but in the same sense that Borges was.)

(no subject)

Now that default may actually happen I'm feeling more bemused than worried. If it does a bunch of people will certainly die, something that happens when many bunches of people go broke, so it's a terrible thing, one not at all to be desired. But part of me is getting very curious about how the different groups will look at one another, after. Obviously I know more or less how the people with sewn-shut eyes will be, and the ones already alert. But the rest, the sleepers! 2000, 2001, 2004, 2008 - who was at fault was clear enough to those looking, but they weren't caught red-handed by the drifting and distracted. But this - it will be impossible to not look this time. Will looking mean they'll see?