"My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out"
About this Quote
Borges turns ambition into a deadpan joke, then lets the joke curdle into metaphysics. “My undertaking is not difficult, essentially” opens with bureaucratic calm, the tone of someone filing a form, not wrestling the cosmos. Then comes the trapdoor: “I should only have to be immortal.” The sentence performs the Borges move of shrinking the infinite into a single conditional clause. Immortality is presented as a minor prerequisite, as if the real obstacle were paperwork. That dry understatement is the point: it exposes how human projects often smuggle in absurd premises while pretending to be practical.
The specific intent is double-edged. On one side, it’s comic deflation of grand literary or philosophical schemes: the dream of total knowledge, the perfect book, the complete map, the library that contains everything. On the other, it’s a confession of temperament. Borges’s imagination is built for labyrinths and totalities, but his body, his time, his finitude refuse to cooperate. The “essentially” signals a mind that can see the structure of a problem clearly while also acknowledging the fatal mismatch between structure and lifespan.
Context matters: Borges wrote in a century obsessed with systems, archives, encyclopedias, and the modern fantasy that information can be mastered. His fiction repeatedly stages the horror and seduction of that fantasy: infinite libraries, endless forks in time, texts that rewrite reality. The subtext is that “undertakings” of meaning-making always ask for more life than we get. Art becomes a way to counterfeit immortality - not by living forever, but by building devices (stories, symbols, recursive forms) that keep thinking after the thinker stops.
The specific intent is double-edged. On one side, it’s comic deflation of grand literary or philosophical schemes: the dream of total knowledge, the perfect book, the complete map, the library that contains everything. On the other, it’s a confession of temperament. Borges’s imagination is built for labyrinths and totalities, but his body, his time, his finitude refuse to cooperate. The “essentially” signals a mind that can see the structure of a problem clearly while also acknowledging the fatal mismatch between structure and lifespan.
Context matters: Borges wrote in a century obsessed with systems, archives, encyclopedias, and the modern fantasy that information can be mastered. His fiction repeatedly stages the horror and seduction of that fantasy: infinite libraries, endless forks in time, texts that rewrite reality. The subtext is that “undertakings” of meaning-making always ask for more life than we get. Art becomes a way to counterfeit immortality - not by living forever, but by building devices (stories, symbols, recursive forms) that keep thinking after the thinker stops.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
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