What Does Literature Mean to Me?

Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations by Richard Burgin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have just started reading this collection of interviews. I am struggling to come to terms with literature. I hope this book is useful for my quest. I read the introduction, first and last interviews and skipped around a bit with the help of the index. I don't think I every finish this book. I did go read a few of his stories. They were good, but I believe Ray Bradbury, or Roger Zelazny are better.

Page 7 "Writing's the kind of activity between thinking and dreaming. You have a dream at the outset and then somehow you have to pin it down." This is interesting to me because it is the model for mathematical work, we image a theorem that needs to be invented, then we pin it down by checking it for contradictions against previously invented axioms and theorems. Both writing and and mathematics are an effort to explore the gap between what we know and what may be.

Page 14 he says "... I think of reading a book as no less an experience that traveling or falling in love. I think that reading Berkely or Shaw or Emerson, those are quite as real as experiences to me as seeing London, for example."

I discovered Borges from a scene in the Netflix movie "Squid Game." He was the author of a book on the desk of a missing person.

In one of his interviews he says the purpose of literature is pleasure. Ok, my 7th grade English teacher, Mrs. Ryan, told me the same thing. I keep suspecting that there is something deeper because of works such as "The Brothers Karamazov," not a pleasant story. So my quest to understand "why literature" is still continuing. Azar Nafisi in her book "Reading Lolita in Tehran" said that the purpose of literature to to explore new ways of being human. I get this. In one of his books Richard Dawkins said that instead of reading great literature, we now read popular psychology books to learn about the human life. Interesting idea and consistent with my own reading until I came to the conclusion that humans are immensely malleable and the varieties of people are even greater that the varieties of songs to be sung using the finite scale of notes given us.

Borge likes American movies, especially westerns because they are modern epics, and he like detective stories because of their solid plots. Ok, so my tastes in reading and viewing are redeemed.



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