Jorge Luis Borges began losing his sight in his thirties. By 1955, when the Argentine government appointed him director of the National Library, he was almost completely blind. A library of eight hundred thousand books, and the man in charge of them could not read a single one. He called it God's splendid irony. He was not entirely joking.

He Wrote Stories That Broke the Shape of Fiction

Borges did not write novels. He wrote short fictions, rarely longer than ten pages, that contained more ideas than most novelists manage in five hundred. The Library of Babel describes a universe consisting entirely of a library containing every possible combination of letters, which means it contains every book that could ever be written and also every nonsensical arrangement of characters. Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius describes a fictional encyclopedia entry about a fictional country that begins to alter the real world. The Garden of Forking Paths describes a novel that contains all possible plots simultaneously. Literary scholars at the University of Buenos Aires have documented that Borges essentially invented the genre of metafiction decades before the term existed. He wrote stories about stories. He wrote stories about the impossibility of stories. He wrote a review of a book that did not exist and made it more interesting than most reviews of books that do. His influence is so pervasive that it has become invisible. Umberto Eco built The Name of the Rose around a Borgesian library. Italo Calvino wrote If on a Winter's Night a Traveler as a direct response to Borges. Every writer who has played with the boundary between fiction and reality is walking through a door Borges opened.

The Blindness Made the Labyrinths Real

Borges wrote obsessively about labyrinths, mirrors, and infinite recursion long before he went blind. But the blindness changed something. It made the metaphors physical. A man who cannot see the world must build the world inside his own mind. A man who cannot read must remember what he has read. A man who cannot navigate by sight must navigate by pattern. Researchers at Harvard University's Borges Center have argued that his later work, written entirely from memory and dictation, achieved a compression and precision that his earlier work only approached. The blindness stripped away everything decorative. What was left was structure, pure and intricate, like the skeleton of an animal that is more beautiful than the living thing. He never won the Nobel Prize. This remains one of the most discussed omissions in the history of the award. The most common explanation is political: Borges accepted a medal from the Pinochet government in Chile and made statements in support of Argentine military juntas that the Swedish Academy could not overlook. He was, in his politics, occasionally catastrophic. He was, in his art, irreplaceable. He died in Geneva in 1986. He had once written that paradise, for him, would be a kind of library. Whether he found it is not something anyone can verify. But he built one that the rest of us can visit, and it has no walls and no end.