El Zahir
I read this short story for my Spanish Literature class and fell in love with it, along with Jorge Luis Borges, whom I hated last year after reading El Sur. The story, which is incredibly hard to find in English online, is about El Zahir: anything, whether it be object or person, that has the power create an obsession in those who see it. The affected person then becomes more and more entranced by this thing, becoming, eventually, unable to think of anything else and loses his/her sense of reality.
Borges’s mind (he is the protagonist in his own story) becomes so devoured by El Zahir, and though he is losing his ability to perceive anything in the world save for that which he is obsessed with, he doesn’t care. For Borges, dreaming and living are synonymous because he is oblivious to the difference.
“Calling that future terrible is a fallacy, since none of the future’s circumstances will in any way affect me. One might as well call “terrible” the pain of an anesthetized patient whose skill is being trepanned. I will no longer perceive the universe, I will perceive the Zahir. Idealist doctrine has it that the verbs “to live” and “to dream” are at every point synonymous; for me, thousands upon thousands of appearances will pass into one; a complex dream will pass into a simple one. Others will dream that I am mad, while I dream of the Zahir. When every man on earth thinks, day and night, of the Zahir, which will be dream and which reality, the earth or the Zahir?”
I would post in Spanish because everything sounds more beautiful in the language, but I’m too lazy to go through C-tools and find it, and I don’t know if anyone will even read it. But this story just captured my interest; if any of you have an opportunity to read it you should.
