August 24 marked 121 years since the birth of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. In most years since 2009, I’ve written about him around the anniversary of his birth. In particular, I’ve long been fascinated about the influence he maintains, more than 34 years after his death. As I wrote in 2013, “…his continued output has prompted me to consider what he did in order to be remembered, studied and written about. He probably did not think in terms of self-management, but his approach can be a guide for anyone engaged in creative/knowledge work.”
I further adapted these ‘self-management secrets’ in 2017 for 6 Success Strategies of Jorge Luis Borges. My feeling is that these points, even, as I pointed out, “if he may not have considered them to be strategies,” remain relevant for the pandemic era, which was not on our radar then, or a year ago, when I curated 20 Assorted Links For Celebrating 120 Years of Jorge Luis Borges.
Our era has also focused attention on the importance of libraries, one of my points in 2017, when I wrote that “although he served as Director of Argentina’s National Library, Borges also wrote quite a bit about the importance of libraries, and the use of them was crucial to his work. Despite the wealth of resources available in libraries of all types, most people do not utilize their power to full advantage.” Last November, Borges was featured prominently in “Can Libraries Save America?” by Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of America, who was president of New York Public Library from 1981-1989. “Borges reminds us,” Gregorian writes, “that it is inherent in human nature to seek knowledge, but without a way of understanding it, without an education, we become lost.”
There is always Borges-related news to share, in particular about the recent publication of Borges and Me: An Encounter, by the “poet, novelist, biographer, screenwriter, and critic” Jay Parini, who is also a longtime professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. It revolves around Parini’s driving Borges on a road trip through the Scottish Highlands in 1970, when Parini was a young Ph.D. student and writer. I discovered that Parini is from Scranton, Pa., where I was born and raised, in reading his recent CNN Opinion piece “The biggest lesson Scranton taught Joe Biden.” Scranton has had its ups and downs (to say the least), but along with the attention it receives as Biden’s birthplace and fictional setting of television’s The Office, last year it elected its first female Mayor, Paige Gebhardt Cognetti, a former Obama administration official with an MBA from Harvard Business School.
In a related Scranton-Borges connection, I’ve written several times about University of Maryland professor and longtime Borges scholar Saúl Sosnowski, author of Borges y la cábala: la búsqueda del verboín, decir Buenos Aires, who was born in Argentina and many years ago taught in the Hebrew school I attended as a child, at Temple Israel of Scranton. His first novel, Decir Berlín, decir Buenos Aires, was recently published.
In other Borges-related news, The Borges Center at the University of Pittsburgh has a newly redesigned website with news, bibliographies, criticism, interviews with Borges, and more. The center is led by Daniel Balderston, a professor at Pitt, and editor of Variaciones Borges. In my 2018 post 33 Eclectic Books About Jorge Luis Borges, I wrote about his book How Borges Wrote.
In an instance of synchronicity that I think Borges himself would have appreciated, my recent re-reading of my earlier posts about Borges turned up one I wrote on June 10, 2009, Jorge Luis Borges and Harvard: Encountering Your Younger Self. I recommended reading 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.” When I checked his name online, more than 11 years later, I discovered that Barbieri, who grew up in Buenos Aires and is now 33, has gone on to have a distinguished career in a variety of fields, including writing. He’s also the founder of a fintech/financial technology company in Argentina, Ualá. Learn more in this Q&A with him published in LatamList last November.
Ideally, the 122nd anniversary of Borges’ birth will see an improved, healing world. With Borges as our guide, we can search for knowledge and understanding, while maintaining optimism and a sense of hope.