Borges' Immense Reward

I thought this somewhat disturbing photo of “Borges groupies” groping the blind author and inhaling his very breath (what else would you label what she’s doing?) was worth sharing on its own. But why not give it some context? Here is a quote from the video below that I thought was pretty fitting:

“Besides, the life of a writer is a lonely one. You think you are alone, and as the years go by, if the stars are on your side you may discover that you are at the center of a vast circle of invisible friends, whom you will never get to know, but who love you. And that is an immense reward.”

Borges Calls Out Kafka

INTERVIEWER:   Readers very often call your stories parables. Do you like that description?

BORGES:   No, no. They're not meant to be parables. I mean if they are parables . . . [long pause] . . . that is, if they are parables, they have happened to be parables, but my intention has never been to write parables.

INTERVIEWER:   Not like Kafka's parables, then?

BORGES:   In the case of Kafka, we know very little. We only know that he was very dissatisfied with his own work. Of course, when he told his friend Max Brod that he wanted his manuscripts to be burned, as Virgil did, I suppose he knew that his friend wouldn't do that. If a man wants to destroy his own work, he throws it into a fire, and there it goes. When he tells a close friend of his, “I want all the manuscripts to be destroyed,” he knows that the friend will never do that, and the friend knows that he knows and that he knows that the other knows that he knows and so on and so forth.

-from The Art of Fiction No. 39 at the Paris Review