From: Various contributors. 2013. Jorge Luis Borges: the last interview & other conversations. Melville House Publishing.
(1) “…if you think of life as a dream, there may be something gruesome or uncanny about it, and you may sometimes feel that you are living in a nightmare, but if you think of reality as something hard and fast, that’s still worse, no? I think that philosophy may give the world a kind of haziness, but that haziness is all to the good.”
(2) asked about his teaching of literature, he emphasised reading books instead of learning details about authors:
“As to the dates of their deaths, as they didn’t know them themselves, why should you know them? Why should you know more than the authors did?”
At first, this book seemed rather humdrum, but as you read it there are (i) some gems (e.g. see quotes above) and (ii) in the context of current debates about the impact of machine learning on creativity, and specifically on writing, Borges, when talking about his writing and reading, his teaching, his life in books and outside books, is a good example of the ways in which machine learning seems so reductionist.
It is hard to see how machine learning can ruminate about poetry and literature in the way that Borges does, spontaneously yet generated from experience, with insights but also contradictions. There is too the magic of what can only be described as a ‘feeling’ for literature as a way of living, in large part based on the fact of his being blind, and the bright gaze of his imagination on writers as fictions in their own creations.
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Post to BlueSky 28/11/24
As I ended reading the book of interviews with Borges (link below) I was struck that he exemplifies why machine learning as a generative source of literature is inherently limited, and why it cannot be otherwise … but not enough space in a post to explore that! 😔
Of course, I wouldn’t rule out machine learning as a helpmate but the imagination, embedded in lived experience, is (i) a priori and (ii) cannot be reproduced merely with words … even though great literature is made with words …
