"Reality is not always probable, or likely"
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“Reality is not always probable, or likely” lands like a Borgesan trapdoor: the sentence sounds like common sense until you notice it’s dismantling the very machinery common sense uses to certify the world. “Probable” and “likely” are words from the casino of rationality, the vocabulary of prediction, statistics, and narrative causality. Borges is pointing out that we keep trying to launder existence through those terms, as if the real must come pre-approved by plausibility.
The intent is slyly corrective. Borges isn’t praising randomness for its own sake; he’s attacking our habit of confusing realism with probability. Most of what we call “realistic” in art is just what feels statistically tidy: motivations line up, consequences arrive on schedule, coincidences are frowned upon. Reality, Borges suggests, has no such literary scruples. It’s full of discontinuities, grotesque convergences, facts that look invented because they refuse to behave like plot.
The subtext is also philosophical, even a little mischievous: probability is a human instrument, not a cosmic law. We use it to tame uncertainty, to produce explanations that feel coherent. Borges spent his career staging the humiliations of that impulse - labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, time that forks. In that universe, the “unlikely” is not an exception; it’s evidence that the world exceeds our models.
Context matters: writing from an Argentina steeped in European literary traditions yet wary of their certainties, Borges cultivated a modernist skepticism toward grand systems. The line reads like a compact manifesto for his fiction and poetry: trust the impossible-looking fact, because reality has never been obliged to make sense to us.
The intent is slyly corrective. Borges isn’t praising randomness for its own sake; he’s attacking our habit of confusing realism with probability. Most of what we call “realistic” in art is just what feels statistically tidy: motivations line up, consequences arrive on schedule, coincidences are frowned upon. Reality, Borges suggests, has no such literary scruples. It’s full of discontinuities, grotesque convergences, facts that look invented because they refuse to behave like plot.
The subtext is also philosophical, even a little mischievous: probability is a human instrument, not a cosmic law. We use it to tame uncertainty, to produce explanations that feel coherent. Borges spent his career staging the humiliations of that impulse - labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, time that forks. In that universe, the “unlikely” is not an exception; it’s evidence that the world exceeds our models.
Context matters: writing from an Argentina steeped in European literary traditions yet wary of their certainties, Borges cultivated a modernist skepticism toward grand systems. The line reads like a compact manifesto for his fiction and poetry: trust the impossible-looking fact, because reality has never been obliged to make sense to us.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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