"Funes, the Memorious" by Jorge Luis Borges

 

One of the stories from the short story collection "Ficciones" by Jorge Luis Borges.  It's about a boy named Ireneo Funes who became crippled after he fell from a horse but became blessed or cursed by a prodigious memory. Funes doesn't recall his memories like you and me, his photographic memory allows him to revisit his past and experience it in great detail, a process that "the visual image is linked to muscular and thermal sensations".

This is the first story I've ever read by Borges. I have to admit, his style can be a bit of a challenge, but the reading experience is highly rewarding. There's something eerie and haunting and even sad about the way he unfolds the story to his readers. 

In this story, for example, Borges tries to imagine the consequences of having a highly superior autobiographical memory, of being affected by something extraordinary, by something limitless... by infinity. It's like Borges was trying to compare humanity to divinity. Thus, the question: What is it that defines humans?

To answer this question, Borges makes a juxtaposition of what is normal and what is not by contrasting the narrator's normal memory and the Übermensch memory of Funes. In the story, Borges paints Funes as a superman, someone inhuman, endowed with an ability that many of us would like to have. However, towards the ending, I couldn't help but detect a kind of sympathy and sorrow from the narrator towards Funes, especially when he tells us that "he suspects that Funes is not capable of thought because to think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract."

This sentence took me a while to understand. What if, one might ask, I think about details, for instance, a dog? Borges would ask, "what kind of a dog it was? what color? what pattern did it have?  What movement did it make? etc". Borges is trying to say that fully retaining a specific memory is impossible. Our memories are bad knockoff Rolexes of the real thing, that's if not the thing itself is wholly made up. It's a matter of semiotics. Because even though, by some means, you managed to recall it 100%, it isn't the real thing.

Bottom line, according to Borges, we humans are unique,  because we forget. That's what separates us from gods. We are not ideal. We are a plethora of many things, but we are not only one thing. 

When I read the story my mind drifted to Tool's Lateralus: "To swing on the [infinite] spiral of our divinity and still be a human". We highly regard infinity and aspire to it because (a) we cannot fathom it and that's why the idea of it is alluring and awe-inspiring, and (b) because we are the complete opposite... but that's what defines us.