Jorge Luis Borges and Harvard: Encountering Your Younger Self

I have been a big fan of the Argentine short story writer/essayist/poet Jorge Luis Borges since his fiction was assigned by Professor Charles Larson for an undergrad literature course in the early 1970s at The American University. 2009 marks the 110th year of Borges’ birth. Take a few moments to read a perceptive, thought-provoking essay, Meeting Oneself by the Charles, in The Harvard Crimson on June 2nd by Pierpaolo Barbieri on the occasion of his graduation. Borges’ short story “The Other” is employed as a device by Barbieri to look back at the big picture of what he and his classmates learned and experienced at Harvard, and how that knowledge and awareness can guide them in the future. In the story, which was originally published in 1975 in The Book of Sand and is now available in Collected Fictions, Borges at the age of not quite 70 meets his younger self, aged not quite 20, on a bench near the Charles River in Cambridge. Borges is at Harvard to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, which years later were collected into the book and set of CDs This Craft of Verse. The book jacket says the lectures were given in 1967-68; Borges sets his story in February 1969. He says that he was writing it in 1972, which would have been around the time I was being introduced to his work at American. The fictional, dreamlike exchange between the younger and older Borges could serve as a useful device to many of us looking for perspective in life, whether we are under 20 or well beyond. What would we say, in a brief conversation on a park bench, to our much younger self, knowing that it is not going to change that person’s path? What would the younger self ask the older? What is it better not to know?