The Library of Babel - Jorge Luis Borges - 227 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Library of Babel


The Library of Babel is a 1941 short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story brings together a number of trademark Borgesian ideas, such as the infinite, and the paradoxical nature of the world.


In this story, Borges’ narrator describes the universe as a vast and virtually infinite library, comprising a great number of hexagonal rooms, with various floating staircases and long galleries, containing a huge number of books. These books comprise every possible permutation or combination of 25 symbols: 22 letters, the comma and full stop, and the space. All the books are exactly 410 pages long, and every single one is different from all the rest.


Among all these books, somewhere, are the ‘Vindications’: books which excuse away every sin man has committed, and offer keys for his future. However, the chances of finding the relevant Vindications is said to be zero, given the magnitude of the library. So, most of the books are useless because they are incomprehensible to the librarians who study them.


To make this task easier, some librarians attempted to remove the books they perceived as useless or irrelevant. But this was futile, because there were always hundreds of thousands of near-identical copies of any one book (different from the discarded book by just one character here or there), and the library was so vast that any human attempt to cull the number would produce virtually no effect on the library’s vast size. The narrator concludes by asserting that the Library of Babel is infinite and cyclical.


‘The Library of Babel’, can be described as a story that exposes the absurd futility of humanity’s attempt to understand everything, when there is so much to comprehend – an almost infinite amount, in fact.

Adapted from interestingliterature blog

The Circular Ruins - Jorge Luis Borges - 226 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

The Circular Ruins


Jorge Luis Borges's 'The Circular Ruins' is a short story that explores the nature of reality and imagination.


'The Circular Ruins' is a fantasy short story that delves into the material of reality. Though some critics have called the work horrifying, it fits with the philosophical background of many of Borges's works. In this story, as in others, he implements the philosophy of idealism. The story is a dream within a dream.

The Garden of Forking Paths - Jorge Luis Borges - 225 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

The Garden of Forking Paths


The Garden of Forking Paths” is another story from Ficciones, 1935-1944.

In this story, Dr. Yu Tsun, a Chinese professor of English, working in England as a spy for the Germans during World War I, has been captured and now narrates his story.


Yu Tsun has discovered that the spy ring in which he operates has been infiltrated by the enemy. He cannot communicate directly with the Germans, so has no conventional way of getting his information to them (such as the telephone). While he is on the run from a man named Richard Madden, Yu travels to the home of a man he does not know. He plucked the man’s name from the phone book, because it was the same as the crucial item of information he has discovered (the name of the town that is the location of a British artillery park in France).

As he journeys to the man’s home, Yu reflects upon his grandfather, who withdrew from public life in order to write a novel and to construct a labyrinth. Arriving at his destination, the home of Stephen Albert (a scholar of all things Chinese), Yu is surprised to discover that this stranger seems to have been expecting him. Albert takes Yu for a walk around the ‘garden of forking paths’ outside the house.



When they go inside the house, Albert tells Yu all about Yu’s grandfather, whose life Albert is something of an expert in thanks to his study of Chinese culture. He tells Yu that his grandfather, Ts’ui Pen, never managed to finish the novel he planned to write, but when he died he left behind a draft containing all of the various possible plot lines and discarded ideas. Albert has only read the draft because it was saved for posterity and then published, with Ts’ui Pen leaving a note declaring that he leaves the draft for ‘several futures’, and referring to the abandoned novel as ‘the garden of forking paths’. From this clue, Albert realized that the novel was the labyrinth Ts’ui Pen had sought to construct: the novel and the labyrinth were, in fact, one and the same.

So, although the novel appeared like an abandoned draft with lots of considered and rejected plot developments, this was deliberate: rather than have a protagonist choose one path and reject the others, he wanted to explore the idea of a protagonist being able to choose all possible ways forward, simultaneously. It is thus a novel in which every possible course of action plays out.


No sooner has Yu learnt – and struggled to digest – this revelation than Richard Madden, the man who is on his trail, appears, and Yu realises the game is up. He shoots and kills Albert, knowing that news of the man’s murder, and Yu’s involvement in it, will reach the Germans, who will realise that Yu is communicating to them the location of the artillery park: the town of Albert, in France. Yu ends his narrative by confirming that, because the town of Albert has just been bombed, he knows the Germans got his ‘message’.

Adapted from Interesting Literature site

Recoleta Cemetery by Jorge Luis Borges - 224 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Recoleta Cemetery by Jorge Luis Borges


‘Convinced of decrepitude

By so many noble certainties of dust,

We linger and lower our voices

Among the long rows of mausoleums’


The Recoleta cemetery is the city’s Montparnasse, a bone labyrinth for the remains of generals and diplomats and statesman, the site of homages to Evita’s grave, and the subject of an early poem by Jorge Luis Borges. The poem is a collection from his work Ficciones



The poem is a conversation between the narrator and an unnamed companion. Borges’s poetry is often described as baroque, but this poem reads more like a juvenile ‘Tintern Abbey’. Romanticism, maybe, but it’s clear that this isn’t a romantic relationship. Instead, the figures on this shared walk are companions in ideals, losing themselves in thoughts of being and non-being in the lanes of the dead.

Adapted from BorgesArchive

Comes the Dawn by Jorge Luis Borges - 223 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Jorge Luis Borges

Borges was a founder, and principal practitioner, of postmodernist literature, a movement in which literature distances itself from life situations in favor of reflection on the creative process and critical self-examination. The Argentine author had a radical way of writing which he showed in his metafictions, essays, and poetry.

His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, philosophers, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, and mythology.

Jorge Luis Borges belonged to a notable Argentine family in Buenos Aires who had British ancestors.



His first publication was a volume of poems entitled Fervor de Buenos Aires, poemas (1923). Later on he wrote several more volumes of poems, essays and a biography Evaristo Carriego (1930).
Borges then moved on to writing fiction publishing Historia universal de la infamia in 1935.


He wrote his best stories, later collected in Ficciones and a volume of English translations The Aleph and Other Stories (1933–69). Borges also wrote some detective stories in collaboration with another writer under the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq. The detective stories entitled Seis problemas para Don Isidro Parodi were published in 1942.


Comes the Dawn by Jorge Luis Borges


Comes the Dawn is a poem that focuses on life lessons learnt through relationships. Borges expresses that life moves through the idea of ‘learning’ - different ideas through relationships – the difference between permanent and temporary relationships, what is ’love’ and what is only ‘company’, ‘defeats’ and moments where you can hold your head high.


Borges splits Comes the Dawn into 9 stanzas. The line length of the stanzas varies, moving between 2-4 lines. The changing structure reflects Borges’ idea that the future is never certain, things can change in an instant and this must be remembered.

The poem stresses on themes of courage, loving on, living with reality and emotional strength.


After a while

you learn the subtle difference

between holding a hand

and chaining a soul.

And you learn

that love doesn’t mean leaning,

and company doesn’t mean security.

And you begin to learn that

kisses aren’t contracts

and presents aren’t promises.