Happiness is blind

With Borges
By Alberto Manguel,
Telegram, £ 6.99

There are, Alberto Manguel writes in this little gem of a book, writers “who attempt to put the world in a book. There are others, rarer, for whom the world is a book, a book that they attempt to read for themselves and for others.” Borges, as Manguel rightly notes, belonged to the second and rarer category. He saw the universe as a library and trusted the written word, more than he trusted anything else.

Borges is the ultimate reader because he never forgot what he read. Perhaps the verb ‘read’ is somewhat misplaced in the context of Borges’s life. From the time he was fifty-six years old, Borges could not read as he had lost his power of sight which had been weak ever since he was thirty. From his middle fifties, he was read to; one of the readers, from 1964 to 1968, was Alberto Manguel. He was then a schoolboy in Buenos Aires and after school hours, he worked in a bookshop called Pygmalion where Borges was a frequent customer. One day the great writer asked Manguel if he was willing to spare a few hours twice or thrice a week to come and read to him. This book is a reflection on those priceless moments when a young and voracious reader spent evenings reading to one of the greatest readers and writers of the 20th century.

This book is about a book lover, by a book lover and for book lovers. Borges believed that books could bring happiness and he also believed that it was the moral duty of human beings to be happy. He said, “I don’t know exactly why I believe that a book brings us the possibility of happiness. But I am truly grateful for that modest miracle.” The only quarrel a book lover can have with that declaration is with the great man’s use of the word ‘modest’. A printed bound volume transforms into happiness. It is a miracle comparable to Christ’s making wine out of water.

Manguel recreates the flat in which Borges lived with his mother and a maid. He remembers it as “a muffled, warm, soft-scented place...It was fairly dark as well, and all these were features that seemed to suit the old man’s blindness, creating a sense of happy isolation”. Blindness, for Borges, was a kind of solitude in which he created his later works, first building up the lines in his head before dictating them to whoever was at hand.

Borges lived simply. His bedroom was Spartan. There weren’t too many books around, much to young Manguel’s disappointment. The books occupied a few unobtrusive corners. The few bookcases held the essence of Borges’s reading. What of the books Borges himself had written? “He would proudly tell visitors who asked to see an early edition of one of his works that he didn’t possess a single volume that carried his ‘eminently forgettable’ name.”

Books formed Borges’s sense of reality: “reading books, writing books, talking about books”. But he never felt obliged to read every book down to its last page. He was “insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal”. He once wrote, “Every writer creates his own precursors.” Modifying that, one could say that Manguel created his own precursor in Borges.