Life & Wisdom Quote by Jorge Luis Borges

Night, for Borges, is less a setting than a technology: an editor that deletes the clutter. The suburbs in daylight are an inventory of “idle details” - fences, street signs, the petty particularities that make a place knowable and therefore banal. In the solitude of night, those particulars drop away. What remains is outline, suggestion, the clean geometry of silhouettes. Borges is telling you why darkness can feel intimate rather than frightening: it restores the world to metaphor.

The sly twist is the comparison to memory, which we like to imagine as faithful record. Borges treats it as selective, even mercifully inaccurate. Memory, like night, suppresses the incidental not because it’s noble but because it’s necessary. A mind that retained every “detail” would be unlivable; it would be Funes the Memorious, Borges’s own cautionary figure, drowning in perfect recall. Forgetting becomes a form of taste.

Subtextually, he’s also smuggling in a view of the self. If night and memory both smooth reality into a usable narrative, then identity is partly an aesthetic achievement: a curated past, a cityscape simplified until it feels coherent. “Suburbs” matters here. Unlike the mythic city center, the suburbs are designed for repetition, for sameness, for too much information that means too little. Darkness redeems them by turning them into a Borges terrain: a maze where the missing details invite interpretation.

It’s a romantic thought with a blade inside it. We’re pleased not by truth, but by what conveniently disappears.