Borges and infinity:

About a week ago, I finished reading most of Labyrinths, a collection of Borges pieces. I read all of the short stories and parables, but skipped the essays. It is summer, after all. I didn't really know what to expect from this book. I picked it up for a couple of dollars from Powell's a year or so ago. That being said, I absolutely loved it.

All of the stories in Ficciones are linked, one way or another, by Borges' concept of infinity. I don't remember the source of this, but I've heard that infinity itself seeme so much smaller than something that is big but finite: the human mind just can't comprehend infinity. Borges addresses this; many of his illustrations of infinity are not, in fact, infinite. The obvious example I can think of right now is the library that consists of every possible permutation of 25 letters over 400 pages. The people in the library believe that the supreme truth must be contained in one of these books, but since the collection isn't infinite, there's no reason to believe that this is the case.

Anyway, I highly recommend Ficciones. For nothing else, it's interesting to read all the different stories and try to see how they will be linked together. But read it to try to understand infinity as Borges does, as a collection of permutations of ordinary things, as a ring, as an example of perfect symmetry.