“Throughout his life, Jorge Luis Borges was engaged in a dialogue with violence”
“Swords, daggers—weapons with a blade—retained a mysterious, talismanic significance for Borges, imbued with predetermined codes of conduct and honor”
“The short dagger had particular power, because it required the fighters to draw death close, in a final embrace”
“Borges spent much of his twenties attempting to write a full-length epic poem that would mythologize this “innumerable Buenos Aires of mine,” as he called it—a work that would, in Borges’s words again, “converse with the world and with the self, with God and with death.” He saw it as a way to reflect the city’s essence, as Joyce had done with Dublin, a way to establish a lasting cultural identity that Argentina did not yet possess in the world”
“His aim, in part, was to enshrine the urban descendent of the criollo, with his ubiquitous dagger and supposedly honorable outlaw ways. Eventually he would abandon the project—Borges was never able to conquer the long form; and though his cultural vision, as it later developed, would be much broader, the romance of the criollo would continue to animate his imagination”
“The deeply Argentinian nature of Borges’s work is often camouflaged by his metaphysical preoccupations and far-flung literary references. But his involvement with Argentine history and politics, and his belief that the country’s fate was entwined with his own, persisted almost to the end of his life. Politics was an emotional matter”