And one more
Posted on 14 April 2010
From an ongoing, perhaps infinite review:
9. The Book of Sand (El Libro de Arena)
Jorge Luis Borges tells a brief vignette of a Bible salesman, a stranger who, coming to his door, sells him a book with no beginning and no end: neither a first page can be found, nor a last, no matter how carefully it is opened. The book is written in an indecipherable language, and no pages are numbered in any sequence. There are illustrations, crude and childish, accompanying the unreadable, uncountable, useless book, but once a page is turned, they are lost in the infinity and can never be found again.
The narrator, perhaps Borges himself, reports that his obsession with this book turned him into a misanthrope. He fears the book and fears it will be stolen. He wakes from nightmares to page through it at midnight, filling up notebooks with descriptions of pages he cannot read and will never see again. He wants to burn it, but wonders if the smoke that might rise up would be infinite also, and choke the world. He decides the hide the dreaded book in the stacks of the library, and thereafter he avoids that street.
The bookseller, whose name he never learned, did not haggle. Borges traded this book of infinite nonmeaning for a first edition copy of a Wycliffe black letter Bible.
http://anagrammatically.com/2010/03/08/the-book-of-sand-el-libro-de-arena-by-borges-translated/
As with every previous Borges story I have read here, if Borges is not attempting to drive the knife into the body of modern philosophy, and twist the blade to slip it past the craggy ribs, in order to show the clear superiority of the Christian world-view, then his works perform that admirable service against his will and without his consent.
I can think of no briefer and more cutting condemnation of soulless modern materialism than a tale, only a few paragraphs long, where a man trades his solid, ancient and absurdly precious Bible (a Wycliffe, First Edition, forsooth!) for a book said to be a book of magic, which merely contains instead an endless emptiness of Lovecraftian magnificence. The magic book of modernity makes the owner mistrust his fellow man, and, too frightened to destroy it, all he can do is hide the monster and slink away.
But suppose, the postmodern irony, there is no meaning to this story about meaningless stories. What then? Perhaps, O Reader, you can find a more insightful reading in the book of sand. Perhaps everyone who opens it will see a different page, and none of the numbers are in order, so your interpretation will never match to mine.
Here is a hypertext version of the same tale:
http://artificeeternity.com/bookofsand/
ah, the review of the Library of Babel. . . .
I read it similarly. The narrator was raised in the Christian faith, much like the Bible which he says, “I inherited from my parents”. The first image he finds in the perverse book is an anchor, which the bookseller tells him to MEMORIZE or it will be gone. The narrator notes at this point that, although the bookseller spoke normally, he discovered the statement was sinister.
“We have (hope) as an anchor of the soul, sure and firm, and which entereth in even within the Veil; where the forerunner Jesus is entered for us, made a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.” -Hebrews 6:19-20
The anchor is a symbol of hope in Christ, so much so that it was a common symbol on early Christian funerary art.
So the narrator’s soul no longer had an anchor in Christ. Notice that he searches through the entire book looking for that anchor, jotting down the symbols he finds every 2000 pages. But he never finds it again.
And where does he hide the book? In the stacks of periodicals – the daily news that has no lasting value because it is outdated and neglected.
Ah, a prophetic vision of the World Wide Web.