BORGES
121
I think it's a very fine work. But he wrote other books that I've tried
to read through, and I've been defeated by them.
INTERVIEWER:
The Brothers Karamazov?
BORGES:
Yes, I never could read it. I never finished it, and I've tried
it three or four times over in my life with the best intentions. And
yet
The Possessed
is a very fine book. But there are other novels I
find better, no? For example, Conrad's novels. But that's my personal
bias, simply.
INTERVIEWER:
You once said to me you could envision a world with–
out novels but not without tales or verses. How do you feel about
philosophy? Could you envision a world without philosophy?
BORGES:
No. I think that people who have no philosophy live a poor
kind of life, no? People who are too sure about Reality and about
themselves. I think that philosophy helps you to live. For example,
if you think of life as a dream, there may be something gruesome
or uncanny about
it,
and you may sometimes feel that you are
living in a nightmare. But if you think of Reality as something hard
and fast, that's still worse, no? I think that philosophy may give the
world a kind of haziness, but that haziness is all to the good.
If
you're
a Materialist, if you believe in hard and fast things, then you're tied
down by Reality, or by what you call Reality. So that in a sense
philosophy dissolves Reality. But as Reality is not always too pleasant,
you will be helped by that dissolution. Well, those are very obvious
thoughts, of course, though they are none the less true for being
obvious.
INTERVIEWER:
In your work you allude to Philosophies and systems of
thought from all over the world from ancient times to our era. But
two movements are conspicuously absent - one of these figures or
movements is Freud.
BORGES:
No, I always disliked him. But I've always been a great
reader of Jung. But I read Jung in the same way as, let's say, I might
read Pliny or Frazier's
Golden Bough;
I read it as a kind of mythology,
or as a kind of museum or encyclopedia of curious lores.
INTERVIEWER:
When you say that you dislike Freud, what do you
mean?
BORGES:
I think of him as a kind of madman, no? A man laboring
over a sexual obsession. Well perhaps he didn't take it to heart.
Perhaps he was just doing it as a kind of game, no? I tried to read
him,
and I thought of him either as a charlatan or as a madman
in a sense. After all, the world is far too complex to be boiled down
to that all too simple scheme, no? But in Jung, well of course Jung
