Life & Wisdom Quote by Jorge Luis Borges

Borges turns literary creation into a chain reaction, then quietly detonates the romantic myth of the solitary genius. An “act” in literature - a line, a metaphor, a plot choice - isn’t a pristine origin point. It’s a coronation: the moment a long, largely invisible procession of influences finally gets a crown. Reading becomes forensic. Every page carries the fingerprints of prior languages, earlier books, inherited forms, mistranslations, obsessions, politics, accidents of upbringing. Borges isn’t pleading for humility so much as smuggling in a metaphysics: causality as infinite regress, authorship as a node in an endless network.

The second clause flips the arrow of time. The literary act is also “the source of an infinite series of effects,” meaning the work does not stop at publication; it mutates as it’s read, misread, imitated, canonized, parodied, banned, taught, memed. Borges is fascinated by how texts generate their own futures - sometimes by creating the very traditions that will later be used to “explain” them. That’s the sly power move: if effects are infinite, interpretation can never be final, and the meaning of a work is partially written by its afterlife.

Context matters: Borges wrote amid modernism’s anxiety about originality and under the shadow of libraries, encyclopedias, and translation. His fiction and essays keep returning to labyrinths of reference, invented sources, and recursive authorship. This sentence is a compact manifesto for that worldview: literature as an ecosystem where beginnings are illusions and endings are just pauses we agree to call “the last page.”