Dear friends,
Just jumping on the Borges bandwagon. A favorite quote of mine from
Borges is:
"The real world with regard to fiction, is the world we pretend to be
real when we read."
Also, Ramona Fernandez in her book "Imagining Literacy" opens with
reference to Borges's "El Guardián de los Libros/The Keeper of the
Books." written about a dozen years after Borges became director of the
National Library of Argentina and began losing his sight.
Fernandez quotes the Chinese narrator Hsiang, who cannot read, yet is
responsible for an ancient library:
The truth is that I never learned to read
But it comforts me to think
That what's imaginary and what's past are the same
to a man whose life is nearly over.
For Hsiang, dreams of literacy are powerful and involve imagining
elevated class and status and participation in a wide social discourse
from which he is, in reality, isolated.
But, of course, this view depends in part on not including oral
traditions within the literacy moniker (not recognizing, perhaps, what
the New London Group refers to as multiliteracies).
Just a Borges reflection.
In Peace,
K.
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