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SEVEN NIGHTS Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Eliot Weinberger, New Directions, New York, 1984
Seven nights of course comprise a week, but the sense of completion is duplicitous. No lunar quarter exists in isolation from the doggedly uninterruptable movement of time. Literature pursues similar crescendos and decrescendos, and a useful question to ask is, how separate are its individual productions? are they abstractions like a phase of the moon? One man whose entire literary output nags at this question is Jorge Luis Borges.
The Seven Nights are seven lectures Borges delivered in Buenos Aires during the summer of 1977. His nearly total blindness required that he compose, retain, and recount each of them by memory. As he turns his mind's eye back to encounter the specific books that have nourished his craft, it is no surprise that an infinitely regressing universe unfolds. That the lecture which acts as a sort of pivot to the series should treat of the Thousand & One Nights gives an immediate clue to what Borges is up to.
. . . for us the word thousand is almost synonymous with infinite. To say a thousand nights is to say infinite nights, countless nights, endless nights. To say a thousand and one nights is to add one to infinity. Let us recall a curious English expression: instead of forever, they sometimes say forever and a day. A day has been added to forever.
You may in the service of beauty, or truth, or anything else, add one to infinity. The addition of seven more is preposterous; it simply cannot, will not, increase the total. But can one be preposterous with impunity? Borges thinks one can. He is a man who courts the foolishness of storytelling with such resolution that it has invested him with grandeur. Blindness has added a peculiar sanctity. His stories and poems stand in a disbelieving world as talismans...