Summary of Borges Short Stories

Hope you read the stories and don't come here without reading them as big rewards lies for people who labour to hone their skills and increase their knowledge.

Aleph: 

A point contain an entire universe...Author finds  friend who wants to write a poem for every corner of the world. He find that post mediocre mediocre  but with a vastly exaxxegerated view of his own capabilities who shoes him the Aleph in his cellar. 

It is found that aleph also exists in a mosque in cairo in a pillar - you can hear the sounds of the world if u put your ear to it.

Al Mutasim: 

A long footnote at the end of the review summarises The Conference of the Birds (1177) by Farid ud-Din Attar, in which a group of birds seek a feather dropped in the middle of China by Simurgh, the bird king. Thirty birds reach the mountain of Simurgh and there they find through contemplation that they themselves are the Simurgh.^[2] (Si murgh means "thirty birds".)^[2]

The Lottery of Babylon:

 The story describes a mythical Babylon in which all activities are dictated by an all-encompassing lottery, a metaphorfor the role of chance in one's life. Initially, the lottery was run as a lottery would be, with tickets purchased and the winner receiving a monetary reward. Later, punishments and larger monetary rewards were introduced. Further, participation became mandatory for all but the elite. Finally, it simultaneously became so all-encompassing and so secret some whispered "the Company has never existed, and never will."

A further interpretation is that the Lottery and the Company that runs it are actually an allegory of a deity or Zeus. Like the workings of a deity in the eyes of men, the Company that runs the Lottery acts, apparently, at random and through means not known by its subjects, leaving men with two options: to accept it to be all-knowing and all-powerful but mysterious, or to deny its existence. Both theories have supporters in this allegory.

In many other books, Borges dealt with metaphysical questions about the meaning of life and the possible existence of higher authorities, and also presented this same paradoxical vision of a world that may be run by a good and wise deity but seems to lack any discernible meaning. This view may also be considered present in "The Library of Babel" ("La biblioteca de Babel"), another Borges story.

The Library of Babel:

Borges' narrator describes how his universe consists of an enormous expanse of adjacent hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books are random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just 25 basic characters (22 letters, the period, the comma, and space). Though the vast majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for many of the texts, some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of a vast number of different contents.

Despite—indeed, because of—this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. This leads some librarians to superstitious and cult-like behaviors, such as the "Purifiers", who arbitrarily destroy books they deem nonsense as they scour through the library seeking the "Crimson Hexagon" and its illustrated, magical books. Others believe that since all books exist in the library, somewhere one of the books must be a perfect index of the library's contents; some even believe that a messianic figure known as the "Man of the Book" has read it, and they travel through the library seeking him.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius 

this was my fav so please read

--

"'Whenever someone creates something with all of their heart, then that creation is given a soul.' "