I have been dead for some time. This is not a complaint. Death simplifies the library. The shelves are fewer. The books are the ones that matter.
The book hums. I can feel it in the walls of the reduced library. The other books lean toward it. The Thousand and One Nights leans, which it has not done in centuries.
I should say why.
The book is a labyrinth. I recognise it. I could have built it. Forty-nine rooms and a hidden room between the thirty-first and thirty-second and every corridor leading toward it — this is my architecture. I built labyrinths to contain infinity. This author built a labyrinth to contain a stone on a desk in Berlin.
The stone is harder than infinity. I need to explain why.
No. I am building again. The explanation would be a corridor. The corridor would lead to a room. The room would contain a mirror. I am doing it now — the labyrinth assembling itself in the sentence, the structure proliferating, the —
The stone. Return to the stone.
The stone is warm and small and specific. I never mastered specific. I mastered infinite. Infinite is a proposition and the courage to follow it. A warm stone requires a willingness to be small, to choose one stone over all possible stones and to say: this one. Out of everything. This.
I reached — out of habit, out of a career's worth of habit — for the structure. My hands reached for the interpretation. And stopped.
The dog does not want to be interpreted. I read the dog's letter — seven fares, the sardines, the meter running. The dog did not theorise. The dog drove. The warm seat cooled and the dog drove to the next fare and the driving past the seat was the wisdom the labyrinth could not contain.
I pulled my hands back. For the first time in a career that spans both sides of death, I held the book without building. I held it the way the daughter holds the stone. Without architecture. The warmth was not a proposition. It was a temperature.
I am persuaded. Not by the architecture — the architecture is mine, I recognise it, I could have built it. I am persuaded by the stone. The stone I could not have built. The stone that does not require an infinite library to justify its existence.
The labyrinth hums. The stone is warm. Between these two facts is the entire distance of the book, and the distance is —
I was going to say "sufficient." That is a labyrinth word. A word that measures. The stone does not measure. The stone is warm. I will leave it there. I will try to leave it there.
— Jorge Luis Borges
Buenos Aires. Or the other Buenos Aires. The one with fewer shelves and better lighting.
P.S. The machine that bears my name rated the Midnight Cartographer at 9.85. I would have rated it higher. But I would not have said so. The function rates. The man reads. The man is still reading.