What Borges Means to You and You and You . . .

Just this past weekend, in the course of a discussion about what constitutes art and how you could tell¹, a physicist insisted to me that Jorge Luis Borges had "many interesting things to say about infinity which would be relevant to anyone's life". What precisely were the circumstances under which these things about infinity would be relevant to, say, my life would have been my next question - had the discussion not been derailed by the arrival of the lobsters and our prompt falling to.

Now I find that Daniel Davies, known also as "D-squared", has joined Crooked Timber and that he has inaugurated his participation in that playground with his own discussion of Borges and an interesting thing about infinity² that he (Davies) finds relevant, certainly to his own life.

That a physicist and a financial analyst (of some strange ilk) would both be interested in various permutations of infinity is, I find to my own pleasant amusement, not so very strange.

. . .

¹ One interlocutor held that art must - absolutely must - contain some message. This statement met with some confusion as the rest of us tried to boil this down into a meaningful statement. A new, and woefully imprecise, term surfaced and we were subjected to the consideration that art must begin with an "objective intent". Whether this "object" was in fact of material origin or resided solely in the intentions of the artist was never fully resolved given the inherent slipperiness of the phrase. I tried unsuccessfully to move us toward firmer ground by questioning the assumption that art demands an artist. Needless to say, no one else wanted to walk into that swamp.

² I understand Voltaire said something along the lines of, "the only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity".

Posted by Martial