The hunt for one of these, with the objective of giving it an honourary place in the bookcase, was like searching for a magical object. I learnt from Borges that there was a sacred book, or more exactly a multiple of books: the Encyclopedia Britannica. The blind man - “slow prisoner from a sleepy time” - arrives to accompany you in that rite of passage. Infancy is already just a memory youth has only just begun. Which God behind another God starts the game off?”Īny age is good for reading Borges, but 17 is ideal. Or, if one played chess: “God moves the player, and the player moves the chess piece. And: “Our mind is porous for forgetfulness”.
What that volume had to offer, even just by flicking through it at random, was not something that one ever forgets: “Ireneo Funes died in 1889, from a lung infection”.
I immediately saw myself grabbing a good bicycle, soliciting the help of some friends - only one of them came along - and heading for the librarian’s huge house.Ī few weeks earlier I had stolen a Borges anthology from my school. That was a long time ago - all the cities and the friendships lost, the time I started to smoke, university, significant relationships, the death of my grandfather, reading, discotheques and ghosts. Are you the student, he asked, to whom I gave the Encyclopaedia Britannica? He was one of the librarians from my village whose wooden house with coloured roof-tiles, not far from the park, I had visited more than 15 years ago. Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca 23, April 2023 – As winter worsened, curled up in my train seat I received a message from an old acquaintance. View of the General Historical Library of the University of Salamanca, where hundreds of manuscripts and incunabula have been kept since the year 1254.
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