The Total Library

It has been a very great pleasure this week to have by my side The Total Library: Non-Fiction, 1922-1986 by Jorge Luis Borges. For any number of reasons, most of which I won't go into now. Best of all, perhaps, has been the fortuitous intersections that have occurred with things I've been working on, which simply would not have turned out the same did I not have Borges to stay (it is, of course, a library book). Most of the week, I was struggling with the edit of one of the more intractable parts of Luca Antara, wherein I tried to summarise the beliefs of certain Gnostic sects from Alexandria early in the first millenium CE. Not easy, not easy at all. However, I managed to improve (I think) upon what I had and sent the section back to the editor for her comments yesterday. This morning I read a luminous essay Borges wrote in 1932 called A Defense of Basilides the False, which covers some of the same ground I was attempting to mark out, with an elegance and an erudition I can't claim, and yet - and this is another reason to love Borges - reading it did not make me think less of what I had done, nor did it make me think more of it; rather it allowed, perhaps, another viewpoint from which to contemplate it. The essay concludes:

In the first centuries of our era, the Gnostics disputed with the Christians. They were annihilated, but we can imagine their possible victory. Had Alexandria triumphed and not Rome, the bizarre and confusing stories that I have summarized would be coherent, majestic and ordinary. Lines such as Novalis' "Life is a sickness of the spirit," or Rimbaud's despairing "True life is absent; we are not in the world," would fulminate from the canonical books. Speculations, such as Richter's discarded theory about the stellar origins of life and its chance dissemintation on this planet, would know the unconditional approval of pious laboratories. 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?