J.L. Borges - The Perpetual Race of Achilles and The Tortoise (Penguin Great Ideas #98)

It would be inappropriate to write a verbose review of a collection of works by an author who says so much with such incredible economy. Sadly, I have erred in this regard and the evidence of my indiscretions can be found below as not-so-brief reflections on, and quotations from, the 18 essays contained in this volume. However, as an attempt to atone for my transgressions against brevity, I’ll attempt to say something more succinct. The individual notes are included more for my own reference.

First, a word about the book itself. Its contents are largely good and interesting. Borges explores ideas of extraordinary depth in a few pages, or even paragraphs. He expounds fascinating histories and hypotheses giving original and intriguing glosses and interpretations of his own. However, two of the essays baffle me by their selection for a book like this. Namely, The Translators of One Thousand and One Nights and The Innocence of Layamon. Both deal with recondite subjects and indulge in highly esoteric discourse on arcane aspects of the, already abstruse, material. I felt them to be inappropriate choices for a book of a more generalist character. Overall though, I thought 10 or 11 of the essays were good and probably 8 or 9 were really excellent in terms of the ideas they contained. It’s magical, and can be overwhelming, to be plunged into such new and vast ideas with such rapidity!

While Borges has an undoubted, and much vaunted, talent for expressing complex metaphysical ideas in pithy prose I felt that this can sometimes lead to grandiose generalisations and overstatement. To be sure, it may be my own understanding that is deficient and it is also true that a person can’t write in a style that is at once epigrammatic and exhaustive. In spite of this, I sometimes felt like Borges rushes to overreaching opinions and ends up sounding arrogant. For example, when Borges pontificates “Citizen Kane is the first film to show such things with an awareness of this truth” it seems overblown and grandiloquent and appears to suppose that the author has seen every other film worthy of consideration.

The other problem I had relates to Borges’ love of metaphysics and magic. Again, his ability to draw out absorbing metaphysical reflections is one of the things I love about his writing so in making this criticism I am partly attacking what I like about his writing. However, as with the grandiose statements I take issue with above; sometimes I feel he goes to far. Essays like A Defense Of Basilides The False or The Perpetual Race of Achilles and The Tortoise show this predilection for metaphysical cogitation in the best light. But essays like The Wall and Books and Coleridge’s Dream seem to show an overzealous desire to interpret in a mythical manner when the facts don’t demand it; or a preference for a mysterious explanation when a more obvious, albeit unremarkable, one would do just as well. It’s strange that the same author who deals so masterfully with largely empirical information in an essay like The Enigma Of Shakespeare can be drawn into what I see as such facile, extraneous philosophising in the two essays I mention in a negative context above. As I write this I realise there are other examples where I am delighted by his metaphysical reflections on situations that are otherwise taken to be empirical. I suppose it is a matter of degree and how interesting I feel the ideas that emerge from the metaphysical hypothesising are.

In the main, it was a thought provoking read full of captivating and novel ideas and complex, pithy perspectives.



1. The Perpetual Race of Achilles and The Tortoise - good, complex

Head scratching and mind exploding examination of Zeno’s classic paradox and some responses to it.

“The precise quantity of points in the universe is the same as in a meter of the universe, or in a decimeter, or in the deepest trajectory of a star.”

“The paradox of Zeno of Elea, as James indicated, is an attempt upon not only the reality of space but the more invulnerable and sheer reality of time. I might add that existence in a physical body, immobile impermanence, the flow of an afternoon in life, are challenged by such an adventure. Such a deconstruction, by means of only one word, infinite, a worrisome word (and then a concept) we have engendered fearlessly, once it besets our thinking, explodes and annihilates it.”

2. The Duration of Hell - good, concise and well argued

Concise and capable criticism of the traditional Christian concept of Hell.

3. A Defense Of Basilides The False - good, interesting ideas

Details an alternative Christian cosmogony whereby the original God created a Heaven ruled over by seven subordinate divinities. These subordinates then replicated this by creating, another God, another Heaven and another seven subordinates. All at one further remove from God and so on through 365 iterations. The 365th Lord of the lowest Heaven and his subordinates created Earth, Man etc.

“Our rash or guilty improvisation out of unproductive matter by a deficient divinity.”

If this cosmogony was widely accepted like the current Christian one is, “Lines such as Novalis’ ‘Life is sickness of the spirit,’ or Rimbaud’s despairing ‘True life is absent; we are not in the world,’ would fulminate from the canonical books.

“In any case, what better gift can we hope for than to be insignificant? What greater glory for a God than to be absolved of the world?”

4. The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights - bad, boring, arcane

Discussion of the various pros and cons of different translations of this famous Arab book. Presented in floral, somewhat abstruse, language when a tighter and less delphic style would be more agreeable on such an idiosyncratic subject.

Also, are we really to believe JLB read several editions of this voluminous book, including footnotes, in English and three MORE in German!?!

5. The Labyrinths of the Detective Story and Chesterton - mediocre

Essay on the detective story and its various rules and examples thereof

6. Two Films (Crime and Punishment and The Thirty-Nine Steps) - mediocre

Essay about how von Sternberg’s film version of Crime and Punishment doesn’t do it justice and how Hitchcock’s version of The Thirty-Nine Steps turns ‘an absolutely dull adventure story’ into a good film.

7. Joyce’s Latest Novel - good, but hard to judge having not read Finnegans Wake!

Critiques Joyce’s Finnegans Wake for being too oblique and for some of his word creation while also recognising his talent as a writer in other works.

8. A Pedagogy of Hatred - good

Criticism of an anti-Semitic German textbook used in schools written in 1937. Prescient.

9. A Comment on August 23, 1944. Good, interesting ideas about the nature of Nazism.

Reflections on this day in WW2 from his perspective, as an Allied supporter, and his reactions to Nazi supporting friends in Argentina.

“They are fickle, and by behaving incoherently they are no longer aware that incoherence need be justified. They adore the German race, but they abhor ‘Saxon’ America; they condemn the articles of Versailles, but they applaud the wonders of the Blitzkrieg; they are anti-Semitic, but they profess a religion of Hebrew origin; they celebrate submarine warfare, but they vigorously condemn British acts of piracy; they denounce imperialism, but they defend and proclaim the theory of Lebensraum [‘living space’, German expansionism]; they idolise San Martin, but they regard the independence of America as a mistake; they apply the canon of Jesus to the actions of England, but the canon of Zarathustra to those of Germany.”

“For Europeans and Americans, one order and only one is possible; it used to be called Rome, and now it is called Western Culture. To be a Nazi (to play the energetic barbarian, Viking, Tartar, 16th century conquistador, gaucho, or Indian) is, after all, mentally and morally impossible. Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena’s hell. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, wound and kill for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall risk this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is blindly collaborating with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must have know that they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules.”

10. On William Beckford’s Vathek - good, interesting reflections on the nature of Hell as JLB perceives it in this book

“So complex is reality, and so fragmentary and simplified is history, that an omniscient observer could write an indefinite, almost infinite, number of biographies of a man, each emphasising different facts; we would have to read many of them before we realised that the protagonist was the same.”

JLB reflects on Hell as a place of unknown and unknowable psychological confusion, not simply a place where the horrors we know on earth are magnified (cf. Dante). He describes it as ‘uncanny’ and sees it as having an inscrutable and unfathomable quality. This is the same description that we find in the postscript to Essay 2 (The Duration of Hell*). As with some descriptions of Heaven in the Bible, it is totally and utterly other wordly and defies conception by earthly beings such as ourselves. JLB seems to suggest it can only be glimpsed in the senseless unreality and panic of nightmares.

*”I dreamed I was awakening from another dream - an uproar of chaos and cataclysms - into an unrecognisable room. Day was dawning: light suffused the room, outlining the foot of the wrought-iron bed, the upright chair, the closed door and windows, the bare table. I thought fearfully, ‘Where am I?’ and I realised I didn’t know. I thought ‘Who am I?’ and I couldn’t recognise myself. My fear grew. I thought: This desolate awakening is in Hell, this eternal vigil will be my destiny. Then I really woke up trembling.”

11. An Overwhelming Film - mixed but largely good, interesting ideas with some grandiose statements

There is a huge amount expressed incredibly concisely in this review of Citizen Kane, which is no more than 500 words long. JLB describes two plots; one, ‘pointlessly banal, attempts to milk applause from dimwits’. The other, ‘ a kind of metaphysical detective story, its subject (both psychological and allegorical) is the investigation of a man’s inner self, through the works he has wrought’. This idea that every man’s life is fragmentary and incongruous is a powerful one and is repeated elsewhere in this collection of essays (cf. #10). JLB sees the second plot as a collection of fragments from Kane’s life, who is representative of everyone, and invites the viewer to interpret them, or reconstruct them coherently, himself; an impossible task.

“No man knows who he is, no man is anyone” seems essentially correct to me and reminds me of Tolstoy’s determinism in W&P.

However, statements like “Citizen Kane is the first film to show such things with an awareness of this truth” seem overblown and grandiloquent.

The assessment that it is a work of genius that will endure but not be rewatched very much seems prescient to me, but this is a wholly personal perspective and one I may revise if I watch it again!

12. Our Poor Individualism - good, by necessity a generalisation, but draws interesting ideas out from it

Essay on how the Argentine character is essentially different from the European or North American one in terms of interaction, or identification, with the state. While cultural ‘Westerners’, according to JLB, see themselves as existing within a meaningful and logical cosmos; Argentinians see only chaos. This may derive from the efficacy of the respective governments but the effect is that while Westerners ‘believe’ in the order and abstract justice of the state; Argentinians do not. At present, JLB concedes that this has largely negative consequences (e.g. corruption and theft from public coffers), but he conjectures that in an era where the most urgent problem is ‘the gradual interference of the State in the acts of the individual’ that this primacy of individual may yet prove valuable. He also notes the affinity between Argentine and Spanish culture; seemingly presuming a common heritage in pre-colonial Spain for some of these characteristics.

“The State is impersonal; the Argentine can only conceive of personal relations. Therefore, to him, robbing public funds is not a crime.”

“He feels with Don Quixote that, ‘everybody hath sins of his own to answer for’ and that ‘it is not seemly, that honest men should be the executioners of their fellow creatures, on account of matters with which they have no concern’” (Both quotes Quixote I, XXII)

13. On Oscar Wilde - mediocre, perhaps because of the limited amount of Wilde I have read

JLB argues that Wilde is often misconceived as a complex and experimental author because of his own success. People attribute phrases to him unjustly and overlook the readable, simple character of his prose. Also praises him highly as a bastion of innocence, enjoyment and fun.

14. The Wall and Books - mediocre to bad

JLB reflects on two of the most famous actions of Chinese Emperor Shih Huang Ti: the construction of the Great Wall and the destruction of all books in his kingdom that predated his rule. The second of these acts is disputed. JLB, ever keen to interrogate the nature of time and history, proposes a few deeper, metaphysical motivations for what appear prima facie to be political actions aimed at the preservation of power. None are especially convincing but some are quite interesting.

15. The Innocence of Layamon - bad

Arcane discussion of an arcane book

16. Coleridge’s Dream - mediocre, interesting history but unlikely conclusion

Explanation of how Coleridge’s poem ‘Kubla Khan’ came to him in a dream and brief examination of other works of art that have oneiric inspiration. JLB notes that Kubla Khan’s own inspiration to build his palace came to him as a dream in the 13th century, some 500 years before Coleridge’s poem. Despite claiming to be someone who always tries to disbelieve the supernatural, JLB goes on to argue that these two events are cosmically linked; “an archetype not yet revealed to mankind, an eternal object...is gradually entering the world”. I’d be more inclined to believe that Coleridge somehow had knowledge of Kubla Khan’s dream-inspired palace. A thesis JLB posits, then rejects in favour of his supernatural, eternal archetype! This magical explanation could have been better supported by an examination of the similarities between the poem and the palace. However, given the magical topography of the poem I doubt this would have strengthened JLB’s position and this may be why he excludes it. An interesting brief history with a fanciful, albeit attractive, conclusion.

17. The Enigma Of Shakespeare - good, informative and interesting

The enigma of Shakespeare is that a man with a grammar school education and only a little knowledge of Latin and Greek could write such universally admired, complex plays. Another facet of the enigma is that he sold his theatre and stopped writing a few years before his death. JLB examines the theory that the author of the plays was in fact Francis Bacon, who demurred to be named as their author because the lowly status of playwrights conflicted with his political ambitions. He rejects this on stylistic and linguistic grounds. He gives more credence to the theory that Christopher Marlowe may have written the plays, identifying his style as far more commensurate with the genius of Shakespeare. Historically, he may have faked his death at 29 and moved to Scotland, sending the plays to Shakespeare to publish for him. Ultimately, JLB rejects both of these theories and concludes that Shakespeare himself was the author of his works despite his relative lack of education. As for the mystery of his abandoning writing, JLB claims he wrote primarily to be performed and that his desire to write may have waned, and eventually died, alongside the actors for whom he was writing.

Opposing Shakespeare’s style to Bacon’s in refutation of theory that Bacon wrote many of Shakespeare’s plays, “Shakespeare, on the contrary, had, as we know, a profound feeling for the English language, which is perhaps unique among Western languages in its possession of what might be called a double register. For common words, for the ideas, say of a child, a rustic, a sailor, or a peasant, it has words of Saxon origin, and for intellectual matters it has words derived from Latin. These words are never precisely synonymous, there is always a nuance of differentiation: it is one thing to say, Saxonly, ‘dark’ and another to say ‘obscure’; one thing to say ‘brotherhood’ and another to say ‘fraternity’; one thing - especially for poetry, which depends not only on atmosphere and on meaning but on the connotations of the atmosphere of words to say, Latinly, ‘unique’ and another to say ‘single.’”

“Coleridge used Spinoza’s vocabulary in praise of Shakespeare. He said that Shakespeare was what Spinoza calls ‘natura naturans,’ creative nature: the force that takes all forms, that lies as if dead in rocks, that sleeps in plants, that dreams in the lives of animals, which are conscious only of the present moment, and that reaches its consciousness, or a certain consciousness in us, in mankind, the ‘natura naturans.’

18. Blindness - good, interesting perspectives and admirable bravery and philosophy in the face of adversity

Borges writes about the experience of being blind and the cruel irony of losing the ability to read and write at the same time as being appointed the Director of The National Library of Argentina. He also answers a question I have been pondering, sporadically and idly, for around 25 years! I remember attending a talk at primary school aged 6 or 7. The talk was to be given by a blind person and we were asked to think of some questions to ask at the end. I remember fervently conferring with my classmates about what a blind person actually ‘saw’; was it blackness? Was it nothingness? If it was nothingness, couldn’t they see through it? My juvenile mind became excited about the answer. However, when the time came to ask and I put my question to the blind person, the response was simply, ‘nothing’. I felt disappointed and frustrated and asked if it was nothing as in blackness. The blind person explained he couldn’t see colours and moved on to the next question dismissively. Perhaps he had been blind since birth and couldn’t understand the question I was attempting to ask; perhaps he didn’t think about it in the same terms as I was asking. Nonetheless, I felt like I knew nothing more about what a blind person experienced visually and was sad; perhaps in part because I thought it was a good question and it had seemingly proved to be the very opposite! To my delight, when reading this essay, I discovered:

“One of the colours that the blind - or at least this blind man - do not see is black; another is red...I, who was accustomed to sleeping in total darkness, was bothered for a long time at having to sleep in this world of mist, in greenish or bluish mist, vaguely luminous, which is the world of the blind.”

Why does JLB only invite his female students to study Anglo Saxon with him? Womanizer?

Interesting to note that he is blind given the book also contains film reviews although perhaps they predate his blindness.

“Now I know that shyness is one of the evils one must try to overcome, that in reality to be shy doesn’t matter - it is like so many other things to which one gives exaggerated importance.”

“A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so” - JLB credits his blindness with opening new avenues of learning (Swedish, Anglo Saxon, etc.)

Ben Macintyre - The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, the Real Moriarty

This is an interesting and well researched book. Adam Worth is a fascinating character and Macintye paints a vivid portrait using extensive source material. Worth is a thrill seeking crook par excellence and pulls himself up to pretty dizzying heights using only his wits. I suppose it is a form of the American dream only realised via illicit means. He goes from a penniless street urchin to a feted member of Victorian London society with a mansion, an apartment on Piccadily, a yacht, a shooting lodge and a house on the front at Brighton entertaining in style and living a life of lavish luxury. Perhaps it is the material trappings that make criminal activities that would otherwise be frowned upon more acceptable when their practitioner is wildly successful. I think there is an element of this but other endearing features of Worth’s character, as portrayed in this book, included his generosity and loyalty to his friends and coconspiritors, his meticulous planning and quick wits, his considerable abilities in avoiding detection and his tee-totalling and abhorrence of violence.

However, Worth can hardly be described as a moderate character and, given the heights he attained in his action packed life, no sensible person should expect him to be so. He seems to have been a serious social climber, an affected and blase spendthrift and, perhaps most all, an inveterate thrill seeker. Some of these things clearly go hand in hand; a man with more modest spending habits could have retired several times over on the takings from his criminal career. Nonetheless, he also seems to have stolen, schemed and involved himself in the world of crime out of a sheer love of the game rather than simply to sustain his exorbitant spending habits. Eventually, this love of thrills lands him in jail in Belgium; an incident that essentially ruined his life. In his old age he lives to regret his profligacy and turns to alcohol in the manner he had eschewed for most of his career. All told, it is a deeply sad story and goes to show how even the most artful criminal mastermind can never really escape the perils of his profession; both material and psychological.

The theft of The Duchess of Devonshire, a Gainsborough picture sold for the highest price ever recorded before its theft, makes for a good centerpiece around which the author can build this highly eclectic and swashbuckling life. Of course, he may have romanticised and dramatised it in places but I was impressed and in agreement with his representation of the picture as a metaphor for Worth’s own life. Worth clearly wanted to live in style and be acceptable in the eyes of Victorian society. But he was also a thief and rapscallion of the first order. As such, while he possessed the envy of the entire art world, the object of desire for much of British high society, he could never display it or even confess to owning it! The fact that he kept it shows some romantic or symbolic attachment to it as it was clearly a risk to be carrying such an item while also committing other crimes.

You can’t help but like Worth’s dedication to his criminal partners. Breaking them out of prison, lending them money and paying expensive lawyers fees and bribes. In the end, this was never repaid and his partners, and even family, cheated, extorted and abandoned him to the last. His lavish lifestyle, daring and cheek in dealing with the authorities are all highly entertaining as well. But the story has a sad ending and I could only end up feeling pity for this bright, capable risk seeker who, in this depiction, does indeed seem to be a cut above the other characters in the rogues gallery he consorted with.

The book contains several other fascinating characters; most of all William Pinkerton, who ran a detective agency far superior to all the police services in the world. His story strikes me as at least as interesting as Worth’s. For reasons largely unexplained, he takes a liking to Worth and assists him considerably by not providing the Belgian authorities with the evidence he has accumulated about him when he is locked up and on trail. The two, extraordinarily, go on to become firm friends! Pinkerton helps Worth to negotiate the return of the famous portrait he has stolen decades ago when he down and out following his release from jail. They write to each other and Pinkerton goes on to assist his children and employ his son in the detective agency. To me, this gave some evidence that he was a form of ‘honest crook’, if such a thing can exist, although a sceptic might argue it is more likely evidence that him and Pinkerton were involved in mutually beneficial shady dealings in the past!

The book is pretty well written, sometimes a little arrogant in its tone, sometimes a little journalistic, sometimes a little obviously seeking to overplay tenuous connections. I can’t argue with the author’s command of the sources, which is impressive and interesting in equal measure. In fairness, making the links to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes character Moriarty is an obvious way of increasing sales and does seem to have some merit. Not least because of Pinkerton’s publication of life of Adam Worth and subsequent anger that Conan Doyle had stolen so much of his material. For me though, the main attraction was Worth’s life and not the connections it may have had to more famous men like Conan Doyle and JP Morgan. Overall, an engaging middleweight read!