Love and Literature in Borges' Essay "Blindness"

Jorge Luis Borges' essay/lecture "Blindness" is an atypical piece of pedagogical material, but it nonetheless feels to me like the standard by which I mean to measure my own attempts at teaching literature. This is the essay that contains the famous, overused quote "I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library," sometimes misquoted as "I have always imagined paradise as a kind of library." The misquotation is significant, because the change the change in tense vastly changes the sense of chagrin which Borges engineered into it. This is a wistful text, a meditation on love, loss and cosmic irony. In the course of the piece, Borges teaches the reader/listener about an array of topics, but, like much of his work, the gentle kind of pedagogy catches the reader unawares - we learn an incredible amount both about a life and about literature while he charms and amuses us.

Borges creates a smooth and seamless reading/listening experience from multiple, unexpected sources, weaving together poetry from all over the world, historical anecdotes and examples from his own work as a teacher. Not only does he develop with the reader a coming to terms with tragedy and a reflection on the nature of disability, but this text accomplishes a metaphysical and epistemological intervention - it reveals in literature something very different from the nature that is typically ascribed to it in the academic setting. Borges shows us the literary as an expression of the human that is beyond a single sensory experience. He complicates the relationship of the written word to sight and calls into question the primacy of the written text, as well as the fetishism for "appearances": the tangible shape that the ideas of literature take as text on a page. This overture is reinforced by his relationship to this text and others that he produced after the onset of his blindness (Are these examples of writing, after all? Does the fact that they were dictated change their status as the written word? Or what about the idea that they were, or that they are meant to be, read aloud as a lecture?). All of these ideas are explored in an entertaining and emotional way that stirs a deeper, almost spiritual sensibility, just as much as it informs the intellect. Thus, it is not so strange that we often find Borges talking about literature, and the teaching of literature, in terms of love.

So the reader/listener (or at least this reader/listener) leaves the text having absorbed two valuable teachings:
1) An idea of love as a critical concept of the lifelong process of learning. Love that is not simple, adoring or adulatory, but committed, tumultuous and complex, like love in all honest relationships.

2) Literature not as high art or a record of elite culture, but as a living body of voices calling out with this kind of love. As Borges describes it:
"I too, if I may mention myself; have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny- that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that in the long run, all of it would be converted to words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end."

I wish I could have provided a .pdf of the entire text, but partial rendering of the text is available here through google books.