There have been far better storytellers than Borges, but most of them are chemists at best.

Borges' Fictions is (are?) curiously fragile. Which is not to say that they're poorly written, or that they don't hold up 70 years later, but simply that for most of these stories, I find myself wondering if they are indeed stories or simply thought experiments, essays on potential stories, a literary criticism of things never written (or, taken somewhat less literally, always and constantly written). There is always narrating going on, but it's ... diaphanous is a good word. You could make an argument that Borges, had he been a different kind of writer, could have written the novels or the short stories which he here prefers to simply outline and then pick apart - or let the audience pick apart - and made a pretty good career out of that. Instead, he gives us that fantastic moment in A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain, where he tells us (fuck "show don't tell") that the greatest detective fiction can quite simply be wrong.

And yet, rereading (some of) these stories after almost 20 years I remember them, so clearly there's something more going on than just a sharp critical eye. Or if it's simply that I recognize just how much he's obviously influenced some of my best reading over the last few years, from Eco to Hoppe.

He understood that modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed was the most difficult task that a man could undertake, even though he should penetrate all the enigmas of a superior and inferior order; much more difficult than weaving a rope out of sand or coining the faceless wind.

Time, literature, narrative, language - the idea that conceptualizing them not only makes for intriguing literature, but even the so-called "real life". Borges wrote literary viruses, little stories that should be periodically re-read to recalibrate.