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RICHARD BURGIN
forgive him. While the other is an utter stranger so whatever he does
he can't hurt me because he's not that near to me." I mean if you care
for people they can hurt you very much, they can hurt you by being
indifferent to you, or by slighting you.
INTERVIEWER: Oblivion; that's what you said the highest form of
revenge is.
BORGES: Oblivion, yes, quite right, but, for example, if I were insulted
by a stranger in the street I don't think I would give the matter a
second thought. I would just pretend I hadn' t heard him and go on,
because after all, I don't exist for him, so why should he exist for me?
Of course, in the case of the students walking into my room, walking
into my classroom, they knew me, they knew that I was teaching
English Literature,
it
was quite different. But if they had been
strangers, if they had been, well, brawlers in the street, or drunkards
or so on, I suppose I would have taken anything from them and
forgotten all about it.
INTERVIEWER: You never got into any fights in childhood?
BORGES: Yes, I did. But that was a code. I had to do it. Well my
eyesight was bad; it was very weak, and I was generally defeated.
But it had to be done. Because there was a code and, in fact, when
I was a boy, there was even a code of dueling. But I think dueling
is a very stupid custom, no? After all, it's quite irrelevant.
If
you
quarrel with me and I quarrel with you, what has our swordsmanship
or our marksmanship to do with it? Nothing, - unless you have
the mystical idea that God will punish the wrong; I don't think
anybody has that kind of idea, no? Well, suppose we get back to
more ... because I don't know why I seem to
be
rambling on.
INTERVIEWER: But this is probably better than anything because it
really enables me to know you.
BORGES: Yes, but it will not be very surprising or very interesting.
INTERVIEWER: I mean people that write about you all write the same
things.
BORGES: Yes, yes, and they all make things too self-conscious and too
intricate at the same time, no? Don't you think so?
INTERVIEWER: Well, of couse it's hard to write about a writer you
like; it's hard to write anyway. You wrote a poem roughly about
that didn't you? "The Other Tiger."
BORGES: Ah yes, that one is about the futility of art, or rather not of
art but of art as conveying reality or life. Because, of course, the poem
is supposed to be endless, because the moment I write about the tiger,
the tiger isn't the tiger, but he becomes a set of words in the poem.
