“Let others pride themselves on how many pages they have written; I prefer to boast about those I have read.”

This saying of Borges, the verse that opens the poem A Reader, is not the pose of a great writer pretending to be modest. Behind it stands a whole philosophy that includes literature and, in a certain way, life too.

We are dealing, first of all, with a question of dimensions. What are the works that a single man can write, even if this man is Borges, in front of the library that humanity has created through the centuries? On one side we have some dozens of years of individual creativity; on the other, thousands of years during which the most extraordinary minds have thought and written what deserved to escape oblivion. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Kafka, the philosophers, the mystics, the historians, the anonymous poets: a library selected not by an editor or editorial office, but by humanity and by time.

In this sense, Borges’s choice to put reading above writing is rational. Why should we be more amazed by what a single mind can produce, than by the possibility for that mind to come into contact with thousands of distinguished minds? Writing closes you inside the limits of what you can create, reading opens you to everything that others have been able to create.

2.

But in Borges’s choice concerning the relationship between reading and writing, something more personal also has an influence: blindness or the value of what is missing. Water gains value when we lack it and are thirsty. Borges, as a consequence of problems with his sight, spent a large part of his life suffering from the impossibility of completely satisfying his greatest thirst: reading.

Blindness progressed gradually until ordinary reading became impossible for him. The irony of life reached the limits of the extraordinary when, in 1955, he became director of the National Library of Argentina, while his sight had become very poor. Borges himself would turn this paradox into a source of poetic meditation: God had given him at the same time books and the night.

Anyway, in Borges’s choice in the dilemma ‘to take pride in writing or in reading’, another factor also had an influence: a large part of his creativity came from his readings, from books. If for Hemingway, for example, one of the main mines of writing was lived life (war, journalism, Paris, Africa, fishing, Spain, Cuba), for Borges the main mine was mostly the library.

From it he extracted the mineral of his stories: mythology, theology, philosophy, Nordic sagas, histories of literature, logical paradoxes, Jewish mysticism, real books and books that he invented himself. Then he melted this mineral, mixed it and turned it into something of his own.

3.

I like to read Borges’s saying also as a sarcastic approach towards graphomaniacs. In this light, the ironic sting of the sentence can also be better understood: “Let others pride themselves on how many pages they have written.”

In every age there exists graphomania: people who count books, pages, publications and titles and present quantity as evidence of their importance. The bigger the gap between the mediocrity of the work and the conceited self-esteem, the more comic the spectacle becomes.

If good literature requires silence, economy and weighing of the word, the graphomaniac has a drunkard’s thirst for noise and especially for attention. As a rule, he does not write because he has something to say, but because he wants to appear more than what he is.

Today, in the endless and completely unfiltered spaces of social media, this kind of graphomaniacs has found the most fertile space to multiply like grass in an untilled field. Books coming out of publication as if they were bread coming out of the garrison bakery are not acts of creativity but cries for attention and pampering.

4.

Borges is right for another reason too: without what he had read, it would be difficult for him to exist as a writer. The library does not stand in front of his work, it flows inside it. In every text of Borges you can hear the echo of other texts. Only a man who had made reading a spiritual act could ‘plant’ in the work he creates so many motifs, ideas, characters that come from books written by others.

The idea of the “Ur book”, the original book, matrix of all the other books, is taken up more than once by Borges. In The Library of Babel, the library contains all the books that have been written, those that will be written, even those that will never be written. In this chaos without beginning and end, there exists the obsessive search for the “Book of Books” (Ur book), which contains the key and codes of all the others. While in The Book of Sand he offers us the image of a book without beginning and without end, with infinite pages that cannot appear twice in the same way. This infinity and continuous change pushes you to think about the slippery, infinite and self-inclusive nature of reading.

Borges said that he imagined paradise in the form of a universal library. The metaphor ‘library - paradise’ generates several meanings. Paradise signifies a happy life, without worries and troubles, filled with pleasures and abundance. The library embodies all these through the presence of the book, through the infinite possibilities of reading. But paradise is above all a metaphor of the eternal world. The library and especially reading also have something of eternity.

5.

Many authors have mythologized the act of creation, they have seen the writer as a demiurge, as the man who creates worlds from himself, who leaves the work behind and through it defeats death.

With Borges the weight shifts. The writer does not stand at the beginning of the world. He comes very late. Before him are the ancient mythologies, the Bible, One Thousand and One Nights, Dante, Cervantes and an almost infinite library. The writer as an individual reads, remembers, forgets, combines and adds a few more pages.

Even the boundary between reading and writing begins to become porous. The writer is first of all a reader who continues a text begun by others, the reader is a kind of co-author who, by interpreting the work starting from his own time, by decoding it with the code he knows, gives it a new life. Neither of the two completely possesses the text.

The reader of the thirteenth century did not read Dante as we read him. Unlike Dante’s contemporary reader, we do not concentrate so much on the religious messages, we are interested in finding with priority the human being and his dramas, the human and the animal, displayed among the flames of hell or the heavenly peace. A reader of the seventeenth century saw in Don Quixote things that we today may blur, while we generate nuances that this reader had no reason to see. And a reader of the twenty-second century, if he will continue to read, is very likely to discover meanings that for us are secondary or almost completely invisible.

Every age illuminates some parts of the text and leaves others in shadow. Every generation brings with it its own experiences, fears, knowledge, prejudices and questions. Thus, the reader is not simply the passive receiver of a meaning that the author once placed inside the book. He reactivates the text. He brings one meaning into the light, shades another, discovers new connections, and even adds to the work nuances that the author may never have thought of.

The act of creation gives the work life, but its longevity and eternity are secured by readings and rereadings. So read Borges with friends and let others beat their chests over the number of works they have written...