"Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual"
About this Quote
Borges flips the usual piety around books by treating reading not as a sacred virtue but as an afterimage: a secondary act that arrives once the real risk has already been taken. Writing, in his framing, is the unruly original sin. It’s private, presumptuous, and exposed. Reading comes later, when the damage is done, and that timing matters. “Subsequent” isn’t just chronological; it’s moral. The reader inherits a finished object and can afford to be calmer about it.
The triad “more resigned, more civil, more intellectual” is a sly ladder. “Resigned” suggests surrender: the reader accepts the text’s rules, its order, its limits. The writer gets to invent those limits and break them. “Civil” carries social polish; reading is quiet, noninvasive, domesticated. You can do it in public without causing trouble, unlike writing, which is a kind of imposition on others: it asks for attention, interpretation, space in the world. Then “intellectual” lands with a sting. Reading feels smarter because it’s a stance of judgment and comprehension rather than creation’s mess. Borges is teasing the reader’s self-image: the cultured person who reads is, in a sense, enjoying the prestige of difficulty without taking the author’s gamble.
Context sharpens the irony. Borges, the librarian and the myth-maker, lived inside texts, and later, inside blindness. He knew reading as both pleasure and discipline, but also as dependence: the reader is always downstream. The quote dignifies reading while quietly reminding you it’s the safer job.
The triad “more resigned, more civil, more intellectual” is a sly ladder. “Resigned” suggests surrender: the reader accepts the text’s rules, its order, its limits. The writer gets to invent those limits and break them. “Civil” carries social polish; reading is quiet, noninvasive, domesticated. You can do it in public without causing trouble, unlike writing, which is a kind of imposition on others: it asks for attention, interpretation, space in the world. Then “intellectual” lands with a sting. Reading feels smarter because it’s a stance of judgment and comprehension rather than creation’s mess. Borges is teasing the reader’s self-image: the cultured person who reads is, in a sense, enjoying the prestige of difficulty without taking the author’s gamble.
Context sharpens the irony. Borges, the librarian and the myth-maker, lived inside texts, and later, inside blindness. He knew reading as both pleasure and discipline, but also as dependence: the reader is always downstream. The quote dignifies reading while quietly reminding you it’s the safer job.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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