"Reality is not always probable, or likely"
About this Quote
Reality resists the neat cages of probability. Likelihood is a model of expectation, a map we draw from habit, statistics, and common sense. But actuality is singular, unruly, and sometimes outrageous. The line points to a gap between what our reasoning deems plausible and what the world, with its labyrinths and accidents, actually presents. That gap is fertile ground for wonder and for knowledge, because it exposes the limits of prediction and the vanity of believing that the real must always look reasonable.
Jorge Luis Borges spent a lifetime exploring this fissure. His fictions are laboratories where the improbable becomes rigorous. In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a fictional encyclopedia invades our world until the invented supplants the given, suggesting how ideas can crystallize into facts. The Library of Babel posits an impossible archive that still contains, by necessity, every book, including the one that explains it, using infinity to make the unlikely inescapable. The Lottery in Babylon transforms society through random decrees, making chance the most reliable institution. In The Aleph, a point holds all points, dissolving the probable scale of perception. Even memory defies plausibility in Funes the Memorious, where perfect recall becomes a curse. These stories do not merely flaunt oddity; they argue that what we call realistic is only what we have grown used to.
Behind the narrative games stands a philosophical skepticism. Borges echoes Hume’s doubts about causality as necessary law, and toys with Berkeley’s idealism, where the real is woven from perceptions and the conventions that order them. He writes as a poet of contingency during a century that discovered quantum indeterminacy and historical catastrophe, both reminders that the unexpected governs us. To accept that reality is not always probable is not to abandon reason; it is to loosen its grip enough to see further. Literature, for Borges, becomes a disciplined way to meet the improbable without denying it, to expand our sense of the real beyond the merely likely.
Jorge Luis Borges spent a lifetime exploring this fissure. His fictions are laboratories where the improbable becomes rigorous. In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a fictional encyclopedia invades our world until the invented supplants the given, suggesting how ideas can crystallize into facts. The Library of Babel posits an impossible archive that still contains, by necessity, every book, including the one that explains it, using infinity to make the unlikely inescapable. The Lottery in Babylon transforms society through random decrees, making chance the most reliable institution. In The Aleph, a point holds all points, dissolving the probable scale of perception. Even memory defies plausibility in Funes the Memorious, where perfect recall becomes a curse. These stories do not merely flaunt oddity; they argue that what we call realistic is only what we have grown used to.
Behind the narrative games stands a philosophical skepticism. Borges echoes Hume’s doubts about causality as necessary law, and toys with Berkeley’s idealism, where the real is woven from perceptions and the conventions that order them. He writes as a poet of contingency during a century that discovered quantum indeterminacy and historical catastrophe, both reminders that the unexpected governs us. To accept that reality is not always probable is not to abandon reason; it is to loosen its grip enough to see further. Literature, for Borges, becomes a disciplined way to meet the improbable without denying it, to expand our sense of the real beyond the merely likely.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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