The death and the compass

In the middle of the air that was breathed in the country in 1980, Liliana Heker decided to arm to a book of interviews on the life and the death. The project arrived at the press but, by an embezzlement of the publisher, never at the bookstores. More than twenty years later, Heker extended the original one and finishes publishing the extraordinary volume Dialogues on the life and the death, in which it includes the following interview to Jorge Luis Borges. On the verge of turning eighty years, Borges explay not only on God, the suicide of Jesus, the beauty of the buddhism, the secret life of the plants and the true reason for its aversion to the mirrors, but also about the memories and the deaths in its family, the oldness, the hope that woke up to him to die and the frustration that it anticipated in his dream of immortality.

By Liliana Heker What suggests the word to him death? - The word death? It suggests a great hope to me. The hope to let be. I am safe, like my father, to die body and soul. Sometimes, I feel a little unfortunate - to all he happens to us; mainly a man who is single, that is blind, that has some precious friends of course, but not many, a timid man like I; sometimes I feel sad. Worse I am consoled thinking: yes, it is question to hope. I am going to die and I am going to stop, and what I can more want than that, what more pleasing thing can have it death, that is looked as much like the dream that is perhaps most pleasing of the life. That is to say, descreo I in immortality but that it is not a source of sadness for me but of happiness: to think that I am going to stop. My father also was safe of the mortality of the soul. He said to me: It is possible that when I am I become ill, to do a taste to him to your mother - who was catholic will call to a priest and will say some pious lies. But you do not create to me. Vos sabs that I do not believe in those things. Indeed because I do not believe in the catholic faith I can say that I believe in her; because not it volume in serious. Yes. But my father said to me again (my father was psychology professor): The world Is so rare that everything is possible; until the Santsima Trinidad. As if it had said that everything is possible; until unicornio, no? Good, I am defrauding it to you here, surely. To me? For nothing. On the contrary. - I can say another thing? In the Old Testament one sees that the Jews did not believe in personal immortality; they believed in the immortality of Israel but not in the immortality of each individual; now, there is a passage in Libro de Job that seems to affirm the opposite, but that must be a trap that the translators have done, or an error of the translators. If you Lee the Old Testament is going to see that nowhere personal immortality affirms; immortality of each

individual affirms to the immortality of Israel but not it, so that you can profess the Jewish faith sincerely and descreer of the immortality of the soul. I do not profess descreo the Jewish faith and of the immortality of the soul, so she does not defraud to me in minimum, Borges. - I believe that everybody descree. I believe that it is a pious fiction species. The word life, Borges, what suggests to him? - The word life? It includes everything. I believe that [Theodor] Fechner, a German philosopher, thought that everything has life. Then that life, is saying, would be good, we can say that it would be slept in stones; soon in the plants - we can suppose that they dream; in the animals, also. And in the man, who wakes up more or less. The life is in everything. I believe that experiments have become lately on the sensitivity of the plants. In English there is an expression: To they green hand, a green hand, that is a person whom it has (is a metaphor, no), a person who has good hand for the plants. And they say - this I know it, this says a correntina to it that I have here to my service, she says that there is to want to the plants because the plants know that one wants them; and the animals, of course, know it. The animals have much sensitivity. I have a cat here. Good, people come here who love the animals. When they arrive, the cat comes running. My sister is scared to them to the cats; when my sister comes, the cat hides in the kitchen or the balcony. The animals have sensitivity, doubtlessly. The life I believe that by unfortunate that one is - and all we are it to times one must thank for the fact to live. Chesterton said: To a man it must be enough to him to think that he is a man, who is standing up, that is under stars. If that already is a so great happiness: the fact to exist; now, to exist for always? I believe that I would be quite unfortunate. I already am tired. I have already lived too much. I have seventy and nine years and at any time I fulfill eighty and I realize of which already I have passed my limit. I am going to tell an anecdote him of my mother. My mother arrived at the ninety and nine years. When she fulfilled ninety and five were horrified; she said to me to me (she was very Creole): Caramba, ninety and five: it was to me the hand. Culprit felt. Usually one says that body and soul are dissociated. Of there the permanence of the soul usually concludes after the physical death. What you think, Borges, of this conception? - I do not know if they are dissociated. If one postulates that they are dissociated, the soul can be inmortal, but that is a mere conjecture. There is a book of an English psychologist, [Gustav] Spiller; in that book he says: if a person breaks a leg, if a rib is broken, if they give a blow him in the head, that does not produce no beneficial result. So that supposition that the death, that comes to be a total accident, is going to improve this. So that supposition that the death, in which everything accident in one, is going to obtain that the soul knows another kingdom, no? It seems to me that that is a good argument. The other is based on a hypothesis: the idea that the soul exists outside the body. Now, [John] Milton for example, who was a theologian, thought that the man needed both things: the soul and the body. It belonged to the sect of the mortalistas. Sure they were Christian; they thought that when a man dies the soul to duer to me until the day of the Final Judgment; soon he revives and he receives an eternal punishment or an eternal prize; but that meanwhile does not exist. When he is spoken of the Final Judgment insists itself on the resurrection of the meat; one does not say that the souls are going to be judged; one says that the bodies will leave their graves, that the souls will qualify them and that all will be judged. Of course, I do not believe either in the Final Judgment. Of any way, the different conceptions from beyond can be considered, at least, like creations of the man, aesthetic facts - I believe yes that. I would say that the concept of God is the Maxima creation of fantastic Literature. The idea of God is much more strange that the idea of the Golem. Which of these conceptions seems to him most beautiful? - I believe that the idea of the buddhism, the idea of the trasmigracin, is pretty. At the same time, the buddhism does not think that the soul exists. The buddhism supposes that all man, throughout his life, creates an organism that is called karma, a psychic organism, and that that organism is inherited by another man; but it does not believe in the trasmigracin of the soul. Think that when one dies, one leaves that karma, that is inherited by another person. Now, that backwards estimates an infinite series - infinite also of births. Because if each human

destiny is a consequence of the previous destiny - by example, if you are born just you are because she has deserved to be born just; if you are born blind you are because she has deserved to be born blind; if you are born intelligent you are because she has deserved to be born intelligent; if it is born, for example, within each one of the chaste ones of India, it is because you have deserved that chaste one; if you are unfortunate, you have deserved the misfortune, good, that always estimates a previous cause, if each life estimates a previous life, that previous life estimates another one, and this follows until the infinite. That is to say, which each one of us, according to the buddhism, has lived an infinite number of times, and if it does not arrive there at Nirvana - one already it is left outside the wheel of the law one will also live an infinite number of times. But when I say infinite I do not mean indefinite, I mean strictly infinitely. I studied mathematical, so I at least have an idea of the infinite thing. - And you must have read something on the theory of the sets, of [George] Singer. , Yes clear. - Good, he speaks there of the infinite numbers, and between the infinite numbers, aleph. He does not arrive themselves at him by progression, that is to say, if you count, one, two, three, four, and follows infinitely, he does not arrive at that number. Good, he is well. Rainer Maria Rilke said: Sir, grants to everyone his own death. You think that there are a own death that must correspond to him to each man? - I believe that that idea took Rilke de Sneca. Sneca says morire sua exactly morte: to die its death. That means that the style of the death is the style of the life. Now, there is one who thinks that Rilke, when saying that, thought about something much smaller. Somewhere he says that before people were born in her house and died in his house, and that now people are born in a sanatorium and die in a sanatorium. I, for example, have been born in the house of my mother, in the street Tucumn and Suipacha, and she had been born in that house. Today nobody is born in its house, and nobody does not die either in its house. My mother also died in her house and my father. It can be that Rilke talks about that, simply, but the idea of Sneca is prettier that the death must correspond to the life. For example, I read a poem of Johannes Becher, German poet that was made Communist later, on the death of Goethe. He says something that I have not seen confirmed in any biography of Goethe but who he is very pretty. He says - I suppose that he invented it because no other biographer says that, and I have read several biographies of Goethe-, says that he was dying and who he wrote; he wrote in the air. He says that he wrote, thus, and who soon erased a line and put another one Now, that would be exactly the death of a writer. The poem finishes thus: Under starb ehr Scheibed, and thus died writing. I watch, I believe that it is an invention of Becher, but what she matters that is an invention, no? You mentioned the case of an own death. Conoce cases paradoxical deaths, deaths whose style is totally in opposition to the style of the life? - I have seen die to five people in my life. I have seen die to my two grandmothers, have seen die to my father, I have seen die to the natural daughter of my grandfathers, and have seen kill to a man in the border of Brazil, of two shots. Yes, I would say that there are paradoxical deaths. But memory own deaths also. This very strange case happened to them to two brothers; one was Pedro Henrquez Urea. Pedro Henrquez Urea had a chair in the University of the Silver and had to take the train in Constitution. And the train left and it ran. He took the train, one seated, he put his books in the network. The name of the other was with him no longer memory, a doctor. The other followed a conversation. Henrquez Urea did not answer to him: it had remained died of an attack to the heart. It had remained died while it was going to give a class, he was all his life professor. Now, the brother of him, Max Henrquez Urea, author of a History of the Modernismo, had a very similar death. It had a chair in the University of Stones, in Puerto Rico. It had arrived behind schedule and one hurried, and the heart was also had left dead of an attack. Both brothers died fulfilling their destiny pedagogical. They are pretty deaths. Now, my grandfathers Borges, for political reasons - it is not the case of entering them had solved to die. Then, after the battle of Green Island, when Mitre had capitulated already, he said that no, that he thought that still a last load could be tried, and they followed it like fifteen or twenty gauchos. It put poncho white, mounted in a horse Moor no, Moor no, tordillo, advanced towards enemy trenches, not to galope but

to trote and with the crossed arms, offering a target. Indeed, he received two bullets of Remington and he died on the following day in a field hospital. It was an own death. He had been welded all his life. He initiated his military specialty like defender of the surrounded seat of Montevideo, to the fifteen years, and to the seventeen years he was in the battle of Caretakers. He campaigned all of Paraguay, the campaign of the Desert, the campaign against the montoneros of Lopez Jordn, soon participated in that revolution, there they were defeated and he was made kill. So that that one would come to be its own death, the death of a soldier. Which would be for you its own death? - Good, which I would want I would be to die suddenly. Because I have seen long agonies: the agony of my mother, the agony of my father, the agony of my grandmother also, that was wishing the death. I can tell an anecdote him on my English grandmother. She was dying, and she called us to its piece - he was three or four days before its death and she said to us: What happens here it does not have anything of individual; I am a very old woman who is dying very slowly; there is no reason so that you are excited all. Is' m only an old woman; I' m dying very slowly; nothing interesting in all that. Nothing interesting in this. After all, what brave; it could see his death as if outside another person. In general, all person who dies tends to dramatize her death. On the contrary, she said: No, I am a very old woman who is dying very slowly; there is nothing no interesting in this. She was a very brave woman; it was as brave as the husband of her when it was made kill in Green Island. There it is the picture of them. When I was in Junn they showed a street to me that takes the name of him, and the tree that he had planted. It planted in the year `71. In 1871. Sartre says that always it dies too much soon or too much behind schedule. You are in agreement with this affirmation? - From as soon as I believe that never she dies too much soon; one always dies too much behind schedule. Sartre is a very rare person; Sartre let write when blind person remained. I do not understand that. On the contrary, I have thought: now that I am blind, I must continue working, because what justification has my life if nonwork? I know that what I write now - I am going to turn eighty years in August unavoidably must be inferior to which wrote nevertheless when he was young, but, what another thing I can do but write? And that I do not do it by vanity but because I must populate my time with some way. Because not always receipt pleasing visits like the one of you. Thanks. Perhaps what it happens with Sartre is that, through its philosophy, made a valuation of the glance. Another thing that happens to him, I create, is that it cannot dictate: it needs, physically, the act to write. - Good, it is that I only talked about to write; what not it can is to correct more. Henry James let write and dictated, and that influenced its style; it was made palabrero, less concise much more. But there are many writers who have dictated. The first writer who did not write directly, but that had discs and recorded, was Mark Twain. Mark Twain very was interested in which was a new invention, the phonograph; it had discs and it liked to dictate to discs. One rose at night, the family oa to speak single, and he was dictating to the disc. Memory a phrase of him: I do not ask of what race is a man, what religion professes, what place occupies in the social scale. He is enough to me whereupon he is a human being: worse than that he cannot be. One waits for the opposite, no? You once mentioned a phrase of Mark Twain who to me fascinated me by his cruelty. It said that a library, by incomplete that outside, already would be considered - No, no, the phrase is better. He said: A good library Could begin omitting the books of Jane Austen. Although that library did not include any other book would be better than many others not to include Jane Austen. An ideal library, but without books, no? It does not have books but lack Jane Austen, already is that advantage, no? Yes, which happens with those phrases I remember a phrase; if she is very ingenious, he does not matter to me that she is right or no. There, for example, you could change the name of Jane Austen by any other and the phrase would not lose anything. Because the overwhelming thing is the mechanism. The idea of an ideal library, that did not consist of any book but that it had the advantage to omit Jane Austen. I believe that the grace is that one. If you, instead of putting Jane Austen, he put, good, to any person, not to include works of, I do not know, of Angel Battistesa, for

example, he would be the same. No, I do not say this against Battistesa. If it did not include works of Borges, we say, already would be a good library. Plotino refused to that they did pictures to him because did not want that its death its image survived to him - No, no, the idea of Plotino was this one. Plotino believed in the platonic archetypes. That is to say, he thought that there was an ideal man, or perhaps an ideal Plotino. It was a copy, and therefore, any picture would be a copy of a copy; a shade of one shades. No, he said: I am a shade, only the real thing is my archetype, that can be the archetype of the man, but I am a shade and a picture becomes mine, the picture is going to be the shade of a shade. Yes, because they wanted to make a bust of him, then, the escultor went to the class of him, made sketches, drawings, and later it made the bust. Pero Plotino did not want. If I am already a shade, it said, my picture will be the shade of a shade. Borges, that has some entailment with its own aversion to the mirrors? - In reality, that comes from my childhood, when I did not know that Plotino existed; I did not have idea of philosophers of any species. No, I felt fear of the mirrors, but the fear mine was different. The fear that I had, and that I did not trust to anybody by my timid phase, my fear was that the mirror began to live on a different way; for example, that my image in the mirror made things that I did not do. That is the fear that I had. In my piece hamburgus was an enormous furniture, with three mirrors; so that I saw triplicate. In addition, the bed era of mahogany. If I had said to my parents who extinguished the light of the neighboring piece But I did not animate myself to never say it. It always lived with that fear. I, before sleeping the piece was not to dark, was on the awares, watched to me in the mirrors, it gave account me of which nothing moved, and then, in the end, to me it was slept. I had many nightmares with mirrors, but it had been able to correct all that asking to him my family who extinguished the light of the hall that was alongside. Excuse, Borges, you are going to give to return the tape. - It is well. Who takes part more in this book? Professor Croatto, professor of compared religions; doctor Gazzano, psychiatrist, who directed the Center of Attendance to Suicida - What do there? Ayudan to people to kill itself? What another attendance can be given a suicidal one, no? Good, I suppose that it must of being all the opposite. It seems yes to me that. - What rare thing that the catholics condemn the suicide when the own Jesus Christ was a suicidal one. A religion that at the top has suicidal - and a that suicidal one, in addition, is God and that condemns the suicide. Because it is understood that the sacrifice of Jesus was voluntary, that is to say, it was a suicide. It is very rare, the catholics condemn the suicide and I do not manage to explain myself so that. But, good, I say to them: if Jesus committed suicide according to you And nowhere is explained that contradiction? - No, I do not create. That is to say: the version that they have is this one: according to them, Jesus was God, the second person of the Trinidad, and man. And it was the human part the one that resisted. For that reason Christ could say (last night I was speaking of this with a friend mine): God, so that you have left to me? ; but that one was the human part of Him. That is the interpretation that occurs, but is not very satisfactory. There, which one thinks is that rather He thought that God was going to save it; when the condemned saw itself, when he saw that God had not saved it, felt betrayed by God. Or I believe that that one is the correct thought, because the theory seems false to me. If It had come to be crucificado, if He had been made man, if He had condescendido to the meat, to be crucificado, so that it protested when that destiny was fulfilled for which He had been born, according to the theologians? All this that I say to him, if you want to publish it, publishes it. Surely that is going to be different that what the others say, but is better that. If all we say the same it does not have sense. You have often said that she wanted the forgetfulness. Does not think that there is a contradiction between this desire and the exercise of Literature? Does not imply Literature the will to be, and with the image more faithful than it can be possible? - Yes, but I would want that she forgot my biography, and my name, and that remembered some story or some verse mine. I would want to survive in my work, but no, we say, like

subject of an article in an encyclopedia. For example, I have written milongas, and the ambition mine was that milongas was known and the name of the author was not discovered. But I have not arrived at that. No, no, I believe that, when one writes, one has the hope of which the work survives. But he can survive anonymously, better; if he can be part of the language or the tradition, better. Virgilio wanted to burn the Eneida, but it did not get to do it. Kafka entrusted the disappearance of his work less nothing than to his friend Max Brod. Does not think that at heart no artist, and no human being, want to disappear, not to leave signs? - I believe that, in the case of Virgilio, which he wanted to make clear was that he did not consider that the Eneida was perfect; he had not concluded it; the book was unfinished. What he meant era: I do not assume the responsibility of that work. And Kafka also. But at the same time they knew that the friends were going to disobey them, because, if no, they had burned it they, is evident. Good, there is another chaos that yes can be more serious. Emily is the one of the great North American writer Dickinson. Emily Dickinson said: I do not believe that the publicity is part of the destiny of a writer. And it did not want to publish nothing. When she died, in its drawers they found hundreds or thousands of verses, and they published them. But she had not wanted to publish them. At the same time she did not destroy them either. But she did not say anything. She died, people found her work; people knew that she wrote verses - I believe that while still alive of her two of their poems were published nothing else and, and now do not know if they have published all, many do not have value, but those that I remember of her are the prettiest verses. Parting is all we know of Heaven, and all we need of Hell: The goodbye is everything what we know of the Sky, and everything what we needed Hell. Prettiest. In addition, a goodbye is the two things. Perhaps, the moment of the goodbye is the most intense moment in the relation between two people. When one takes leave of somebody, one is more with that person than if one sees it vulgarly. At the same time, one knows that that one is the last time. I want to say that in the goodbye they occur simultaneously (I suppose that he is that what she meant), occur the Maxima simultaneously is present at and the Maxima absence, no? Parting is all you know English, no? Good, Parting is all we know of Heaven, and all we need of Hell. What pretty one to think that one precise one of hell, what devises rare, no? Ralph was friend of [] Emerson, corresponded itself with him. I was in the house of her, in the New England, a town like other towns of the New England, a little lost. She lived all her life there. I believe that she was on the verge of marrying and she did not do it. And the letters of her are very pretty also. The poems I do not know if they can survive in the translation, because she took care of much the form. The English poetry in general, no? , I do not know if it can survive in the translation. - In addition there is another thing. The English words are very brief. ] Mujica Lainez said [Manuel to me that it really needed two sonetos for each soneto Shakespeare. In addition, the English is a very physical language. Soon, the English has the possibility of verbs with you preposition that they do not exist in Spanish. I was rereading the ballad of the East and the West, [Rudyard] Kipling, and found this line (is an English military man whom she persecutes to a cuatrero, a thief of horses in Gwana; he persecutes it, there is a very pretty episode, and ride all the night, and Kipling says): They have riden the lob moon out of the sky. In Spanish you cannot say that. To ride until the moon is outside the sky. It sounds very heavy. Which considers oprobiosa of the deaths that know? And the noblest which? - Oprobiosa it is one long agony. And noblest it is an abrupt death, no? In their Literature, the personages often vindicate themselves by a violent death. - Yes, I have taken care much of the death. And I am thinking to write a book counting different deaths and agonies. You complete different words, also. They told the death me of a French grammarian. Who was? Good, nonmemory the name at this moment. He died in his law; it was grammarian and said something as well as: Je meurs, on peut dire aussi: je me meurs. It died in his law, no? it died being a grammarian. That also is an own death. I die can also say myself: I die. They say that [Franois] Rabelais said: Perhaps I go towards the great one. Him grand peuttre. How was modifying its conception of the life and the death through the different stages from its life? - When I was young I tended to the sadness, to dramatize itself; it wanted to be Hamlet or

Raskolnikoff, and now no longer. There is a death of which it is never spoken: the death backwards. What produces greater nostalgia to him: knowledge that will not be in the future or knowledge that are been dead for the past? - Good, you are mentioning the poem Of Rerum Natura, of Lucrecio. That yes that did not know it. - Good. Lucrecio says: people think I am going to die, the world follows, the men follow, what horror, but does not think: what horror, I was dead during the site of Troy. He says that; if to anybody he hurts to him not to have been present in the site of Troy what matters that he is not present in the next wars. That is in the poem of Lucrecio. Because Lucrecio did not believe in immortality, and said: who complain to die body and soul must complain also not to have lived in the past. Except for if it is believed in the trasmigracin. Then yes it is possible to be had been in Troy. You and I, in fact, were called Aquiles and Hctor. But what rare that you have had that idea. Watch that I have read and have found that idea solely in the poem Of Rerum Natura enough, of Lucrecio. I greet it, Lucrecio! Thanks. I do not know if it wants to add another thing, Borges. - No, no, I believe that I have been too prattling. Memory that a nephew mine (I gave many lectures, had to do it) a day said to me: You are made Gallego unbearable. I became unbearable Gallego speaking and speaking. I must excuse me by the excess of conferences.