#30 Thurs (7/21/22) - [OW] On The Secret Miracle and The Other Death by Borges

 Both of these stories involve men who at the moment of their death are granted a small personal miracle, to redo a key moment or complete a crucial task.

In The Secret Miracle a Jew facing a Nazi firing squad is given one year in which to complete the composition of his drama, The Enemies.  Time stands still for him, en tableau, and he writes and rewrites the drama in his head until he is satisfied.  This is similar in some ways to the trope of 'your whole life flashing before your eyes' at the moment of death. It seems somehow possible that one just might live a lifetime in a fraction of a second. Memory can seem instantaneous, complete, and verisimilar. The recollection of a sensation excites the same feelings as the original sensation did. In dreams our perception and understanding of time is inexplicably altered.

In The Other Death, a young peasant, recruited into a civil war in Argentina, in a moment of cowardice, flees from a battle. He lives a spurious lifetime of regret and upon his death bed many years later is given the option of dying a hero in that battle, which he chooses.  There are those who remember him as the coward, but others who remember him as the hero, and just one man who can remember him as both. 

Both of these stories mention Virgil, and in particular the Eclogue IV, in which it is believed by some that Virgil prophesied the birth of Christ. Written during the reign of Augustus and published in 38 or 39 BCE, it was fortuitously assigned, years or millenia later, to that branch of literature known as prophetic.

One the night before his scheduled execution, Hladik has a dream, in which he is approached by a blind librarian, who holds forth an atlas and tells that he and his forefathers have sought the Godhead in one of the letters of a book in the Library. Hladik inspects a map of India in the book and touches one of the smallest letters, and hears a voice say "The time for your labor has been granted." 

The passage is remarkable and worth rereading:

    Toward dawn he dreamed that he had concealed himself in one of the
naves of the Clementine Library. A librarian wearing dark glasses asked
him: "What are you looking for?" Hladik answered: "I am looking for
God." The librarian said to him: "God is in one of the letters on one of the
pages of one of the four hundred thousand volumes of the Clementine. My
fathers and the fathers of my fathers have searched for this letter; I have
grown blind seeking it." He removed his glasses, and Hladik saw his eyes,
which were dead. A reader came in to return an atlas. "This atlas is
worthless," he said, and handed it to Hladik, who opened it at random. He
saw a map of India as in a daze. Suddenly sure of himself, he touched one
of the tiniest letters. A ubiquitous voice said to him: "The time of your labor
has been granted."*

Borges published The Secret Miracle in Artifices in 1944.  He started to go blind in the 30's and was completely blind by around 1955. It was also in 1955 that he became Director of the National Library.  He had been a librarian at a branch library before the Peron regime, but was demoted, and resigned.  The Secret Miracle could in a way be prophetic of his own destiny to be the blind librarian, searching for the Divine in the letters of a book.

-------------------------

* Irby tr. (Labyrinths)

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