There was time, now...
Dec. 18th, 2011 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wolven7"Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire."
"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."
"...the fact is that every writer creates his predecessors." -Jorge Luis Borges
Last night, hanging out with my friend Katherine (with whom I presented at Dragon*Con, this past year), I did some work on codifying my theory that The Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough At Last" was an attempt by Rod Serling to show the loneliness and pathos of Jorge Luis Borges' problematic anti-Peronist stance, especially toward the end of his life.
What I mean is, you take Burges Meredith as the man who finds the Library at the "End of the World" (and who mentions George Bernard Shaw, TWICE), and you have the analogue of Borges who, toward the end of his life, dreamt of the Peronist Government not coming back into power. You see, the majority of the people in Argentina-- and indeed the rest of the world-- Loved the Perons, while Borges despised them, and even used some pretty despicable tactics to try to get them removed from power. Their removal, and that of all those who supported them-- ostensibly The Whole World-- would have given him the time and space to maintain Argentina's National Library, and engage the things he loved, and thus live in a world he understood. But he would have been alone.
At the end of his life Borges was nearly alone in his political philosophy and he was going literally blind, while surrounded by books, but had he actually achieved his goal of keeping the Perons from power he would have had nothing to contextualise those great works-- no interactions with others to impart meaning to them. Most of these things sit distant from each other, as mere events, in his life. There's nothing in the fabric of them to situate the attributes of his blindess, his political thought, his writings on infinity and time, and Borges-the-Man's loneliness as a whole picture, as a story to be told.
In a truly Borgesian turn, Jorge Luis Borges lived his life, wrote many stories and essays, ran a library, railed against a massively influential and popular government, maybe once found an interesting coin, went blind, and died, but it's only through the lens of an episode of a television show that was written when he was sixty years old that we are able to contextualise and give meaning to the gestalt of those characteristics. It is only through the creation of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone-- a show which, ostensibly, had no connection to the man or his work-- that we can clearly feel the whole of who Borges was.
"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."
"...the fact is that every writer creates his predecessors." -Jorge Luis Borges
Last night, hanging out with my friend Katherine (with whom I presented at Dragon*Con, this past year), I did some work on codifying my theory that The Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough At Last" was an attempt by Rod Serling to show the loneliness and pathos of Jorge Luis Borges' problematic anti-Peronist stance, especially toward the end of his life.
What I mean is, you take Burges Meredith as the man who finds the Library at the "End of the World" (and who mentions George Bernard Shaw, TWICE), and you have the analogue of Borges who, toward the end of his life, dreamt of the Peronist Government not coming back into power. You see, the majority of the people in Argentina-- and indeed the rest of the world-- Loved the Perons, while Borges despised them, and even used some pretty despicable tactics to try to get them removed from power. Their removal, and that of all those who supported them-- ostensibly The Whole World-- would have given him the time and space to maintain Argentina's National Library, and engage the things he loved, and thus live in a world he understood. But he would have been alone.
At the end of his life Borges was nearly alone in his political philosophy and he was going literally blind, while surrounded by books, but had he actually achieved his goal of keeping the Perons from power he would have had nothing to contextualise those great works-- no interactions with others to impart meaning to them. Most of these things sit distant from each other, as mere events, in his life. There's nothing in the fabric of them to situate the attributes of his blindess, his political thought, his writings on infinity and time, and Borges-the-Man's loneliness as a whole picture, as a story to be told.
In a truly Borgesian turn, Jorge Luis Borges lived his life, wrote many stories and essays, ran a library, railed against a massively influential and popular government, maybe once found an interesting coin, went blind, and died, but it's only through the lens of an episode of a television show that was written when he was sixty years old that we are able to contextualise and give meaning to the gestalt of those characteristics. It is only through the creation of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone-- a show which, ostensibly, had no connection to the man or his work-- that we can clearly feel the whole of who Borges was.
