There are many ways (all very difficult) to face and overcome, if not defeat, an illness or a serious impairment. Jorge Luis Borgeswhen he almost completely lost his sight due to a disease (retinopathy) perhaps in his hereditary case, he chose a certainly original one, in harmony with his ideas on literature and the condition of the writer. He decided to study High Englishthe impenetrable language of the Nordic poems he loved: and without even the help of Braille writing, which he never learned to read, but only thanks to the voice, to sound learning.
Incidentally, among the examples he draws from literary history, an English essayist recalls it, Andrew Lelandin a book dedicated to blindness in its medical, social and cultural aspects, The Country of the Blind (Penguin), where he invites re-reading at least one conference from 1977 entitled precisely Blindness (in Italy published by the publisher Mimesis); in it the Argentine writer recalls the moment in which, more than twenty years earlier, he became director of the Buenos Aires library just as his long illness was approaching its climax.
It is obviously a theme on which Borges wrote a lot, this contradiction between the loss of sight and his world of books, it is enough to think about the truths of In praise of the shadow («This twilight is slow and does not hurt;/it flows down a gentle slope/and resembles eternity./My friends have no faces,/women are what they were many years ago,/road crossings could be others,/ there are no letters on the pages of the books»): but in 1977 he added an important piece of autobiography, recounting his great challenge at the time to that «strange irony of the facts».
«I had always imagined – he explained, and it is one of his most famous affirmations – Paradise in the form of a library»; but once inside, he could scarcely decipher the title pages and spines of the books. «So – he adds – I wrote the Poetry of gifts: “Nobody humiliate with tears or reproaches / the confession of mastery / of God, who with magnificent irony / gave me volumes and night together”». But she didn’t stop there. And to three students at the University (where he was a professor of English) he made a rather original proposal: study Anglo-Saxon together, switch to Scandinavian literature, climb among the runes.
It was something simple and incredible, also because the study took place only on an oral and descriptive basis: «I had replaced the visible world with the sound world of the Anglo-Saxon language». Being blind has its advantages, Borges concludes not without irony. «I owe the darkness some gifts»: not only the Anglo-Saxon but also «my scarce knowledge of Icelandic, the pleasure of many lines, of many verses, of many poems and of having written another book entitled, with a pinch of falsehood, with a certain presumption, In praise of the shadow».
A pinch of falsehood seems an obvious key to understanding, at least as regards the intrinsic difficulty of such a praise. According to Leland, who precisely analyzes the possibilities of responding not directly to the disease that strikes us, as is obvious, but to the anguish it causes us, this reaction is complex, heroic one would say; unique (perhaps) and exceptional (certainly). In the over forty books written by the blind, signs of crisis and anxiety appear here and there, as is inevitable: but the almost crazy decision to learn a very difficult language, especially without the help of writing, opened up a new world for him. It is a road that perhaps only he could travel. However, great artists – not just writers – also have this destiny, of leaving us amazed and, let’s face it, a little disoriented each time.