Borges+And+Myself+(anc)

BORGES AND MYSELF

** __Summary:__   **    The story Borges and Myself is about an unnamed man, who compares himself to a man called Borges. He says that he walks the streets of his home and revels in simply things, while Borges travels the world, and is featured in dictionaries of biography, and writes home about news, and excitement. For Borges his interest in simple things seems showy, and stagy, while the unnamed man has an honest affinity for the smell of coffee, hourglasses, eighteenth century typography, and the roots of words. The unnamed man states that they are on good terms, but that he lives, simply so that Borges can write his stories and poems, and that Borges' poems are his justification. He fears that he will lose himself in Borges, and that he has surrendered everything to him so that he may write the stories and poems, in which he sees little of himself. In the end he says, he is so mixed up in Borges' life he doesn't even know which one of them is writing the story.



__About The Author:__ George Luis Borges new from the early age of six that he was going to be a writer. He began working in his chosen profession at a very early age, translating Oscar Wilde's fairly tale "The Happy Prince" into spanish. Borges credits hs father with the inspiration for his writing career, feeling that his father had first made him aware of poetry, and of the idea that words could be symbolic and powerful, not simply a means for mundane communication. He learned english at an early age from his grandmother, and was particularly fond of Edgar Allan Poe's horror stories, and the adventures of Robert Louis Stevenson. His family was traveling in Europe when World War I began, they took refuge in Switzerland. Here Borges attended school, and learned to speak German, French, and Latin. After the war the family moved to Italy, then spain, and eventually back to Argentina. George began his writing career as a poet, and considered himself always a poet first and formost. Around the 1940's, he began writing experimental prose, stories about transparent tigers, wizards who conjure visions in a bowl of ink, and encyclopedias that don't record events, but rather causes them. It was also during this time that he started using one of his most famous images: the maze. He used the maze as a metaphor for the journey of life with all of it's twists, turns, and dead ends. 



__ **My Opinion:** __ I thought that "Borges and Myself" was a very interesting read. I feel that losing oneself in you're career is a very common occurence, and I very much enjoyed how Borges wrote about his struggles with this subject. I was impressed by the way he described the similarities and differences between the two different facets of himself, so that you really don't know until the end that he is talking about himself. I very much liked this book as a commentary on the human struggles to keep work and home life seperate, and to maintain your own identity under the scruples of society.