Imagining Borges

… drunk.

The universe (which others call the Pub) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal bars. In the center of each gallery is a dumbwaiter shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any bar one can see the floors above and below – one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the bars is always the same: twenty shelves, five to each side, line four of the bar’s six sides; the height of the shelves, floor to ceiling is hardly greater than the height of the normal bartender. One of the bar’s free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another bar, identical to the first – identical in fact to all. To the left and right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for sleeping, upright; the other, for satisfying one’s physical necessities. Through this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance. In the vestibule there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer from this mirror that the Pub is not infinite – if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication? I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite … Light is provided by certain spherical fruits that bear the name “bulbs.” There are two of these bulbs in each bar, set crosswise. The light they give is insufficient, and unceasing.

Like all men of the Pub, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a drink, perhaps the wine of wines. Now that my tongue can hardly make out what I myself have drunk, I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the bar where I was born. When I am dead, compassionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite. I declare that the Pub is endless. Idealists argue that the hexagonal bars are the necessary shape of absolute space, or at least of our perception of space. They argue that a triangular or pentagonal chamber is inconceivable. (Mystics claim that their ecstasies reveal to them a circular chamber containing an enormous circular glass that reaches to the wall and is ever exactly half-full with the perfect wine though drunk from by all and refilled by no known source. But their testimony is suspect, their words obscure. That ever half-full glass is God.) Let it suffice for the moment that I repeat the classic dictum: The Pub is a sphere whose exact center is any bar and whose circumference is unattainable.