Arrival, now, to the ineffable center of my story; here begins my despair as a writer. Each language is an alphabet of symbols whose use presupposes a past that the interlocutors share; how to transmit the infinite Aleph to others, which my timorous memory barely embraces? The mystics, in such circumstances, are prodigal of emblems: to signify the divinity, a Persian speaks of a bird that in some way is all the birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere; Ezekiel, of an angel with four faces that goes at the same time to the East and to the West, to the North and to the South. (Not in vain remember these inconceivable analogies, they have some relationship with the Aleph). Perhaps the gods would not deny me the discovery of an equivalent image, but this relationship would remain contaminated with literature and falsehood. On the other hand, the central problem is insoluble: the enumeration, albeit partial, of an infinite whole. In that gigantic instant, I saw millions of pleasing or atrocious acts; none of them surprised me as the fact that everyone occupied the same point, without overlapping and without transparency. What they saw my eyes was simultaneous: what I will transcribe, next, because that is the language. Something, however, I will write down.
In the lower part of the staircase, on the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost intolerable radiance. At first I believed it rotated; then I realized that that movement was an illusion produced by the vertiginous shows that it contained. The diameter of the Aleph will have been two or three centimeters, but the cosmic space was contained there, without the vastness suffering from it. Everything (the crystal of the mirror, for example) was infinite things, because I saw it distinctly from all points of the universe. I saw the populous sea, I saw the dawn and the evening, I saw the multitudes of America, I saw a silver spiderweb in the middle of a black pyramid, I saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), I saw endless eyes that were fixed in me like in a mirror, I saw all the mirrors of the planet and nobody thought about it, I felt infinite veneration, infinite pain.
JL Borges ( L'Aleph , 1949)
In the lower part of the staircase, on the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost intolerable radiance. At first I believed it rotated; then I realized that that movement was an illusion produced by the vertiginous shows that it contained. The diameter of the Aleph will have been two or three centimeters, but the cosmic space was contained there, without the vastness suffering from it. Everything (the crystal of the mirror, for example) was infinite things, because I saw it distinctly from all points of the universe. I saw the populous sea, I saw the dawn and the evening, I saw the multitudes of America, I saw a silver spiderweb in the middle of a black pyramid, I saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), I saw endless eyes that were fixed in me like in a mirror, I saw all the mirrors of the planet and nobody thought about it, I felt infinite veneration, infinite pain.
JL Borges ( L'Aleph , 1949)
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