122
RICHARD BURGIN
I have read far more widely than Freud, but in Jung you feel a
wide and hospitable mind. But in the case of Freud it all boils down
to a few rather unpleasant facts. But of course, that's merely my
ignorance or my bias.
INTERVIEWER:
I take it you don't think much of the Existentialists
either?
BORGES:
No. I think that existentialism makes for a kind of vanity.
I met Sartre; I think he wrote about me in some magazine, and he
praised me up. NaturaIly it's a great thing for an Argentine to be
praised by a Frenchman, no? But I always disliked him.
INTERVIEWER:
PersonaIly, you mean?
BORGES:
No, no no no. I dislike people who are out for propaganda.
I don't think he should have aIlowed a cafe to be caIled Cafe Exis–
tentialism. I don't think of Bishop Berkeley doing that kind of thing,
or of Schopenhauer. And I could hardly think of him as a gentle–
man, though of course that's another old-fashioned word, no?
INTERVIEWER:
Unfortunately.
BORGES:
Unfortunately, yes. I think that the species is dying out, or
has died out, no? It's a great pity.
INTERVIEWER:
In the poem "Matthew 25: 30" you say, "And still you
have not written the poem." Do you reaIly feel that way?
BORGES:
But that was an actual experience. I felt that, after all, an
overwhelming number of things has happened to me, and amongst
these things bitterness and misfortune and disappointment and sad–
ness and loneliness, and that those things are the stuff that poetry is
made of, and that if I were a real Poet I should think of my
unhappiness, of my many forms of unhappiness as being reaIly gifts.
Of course among those things in the poem there were good things
also, no? For example, Walt Whitman, but most of them, at least
as far as I can remember the poem, most of them are reaIly mis–
fortunes. Yet in a way they were all gifts, and the experience was
real. Of course when I wrote it I may have invented the examples
I used, but the feeling I had of many things having happened to
me and yet of my not having used them for an essential purpose,
which to me was poetry, that to me was a very real experience. In
fact
it
made me forget that that afternoon I had been jilted.
