If there’s one thing Jorge Luis Borges has over Benedict de Spinoza, it’s Style. Borges, a beloved son of Latin America and some say the best author never to win a Nobel Prize, nurtures his beguiling short stories until each develops a life of its own. Their content is rich and complex and always character-full, for want of a real word. Walter Truett Anderson said of postmodernism that it “mixed rituals and traditions like greens in a salad” and this is a good description of a Borges story.
Spinoza is unreadable. No, I take that back. Spinoza is unreadable to most of us. But some would say he is more important than Borges. He develops truly original concepts of pantheism and determinism and other isms in the form of The Geometry Textbook. You know, A is to B as C is to D so E…you get the picture.
So what happens when Borges writes a poem about Spinoza. I’ll tell what happens – we suddenly get to love Spinoza. Borges writes about Spinoza polishing his lenses with the hyacinth in the confines of the ghetto walls, a quiet Spinoza “free of metaphor and myth”. And when he writes that Spinoza sits there “dreaming up a brilliant labyrinth“, the picture of Spinoza is complete. In those five words we suddenly see through the convoluted philosophical details, and appreciate the man himself. It’s Borges’ Style over Spinoza’s Substance. The best of both worlds.
