Borges on Chaos Theory

In The Aleph, Borges predicts the internet : "... Carlos Argentino tasted it, pronounced it “interesting,” and, after a few drinks, launched into a glorification of modern man. “I view him,” he said with a certain unaccountable excitement, “in his inner sanctum, as though in his castle tower, supplied with telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries, timetables, handbooks, bulletins...” He remarked that for a man so equipped, actual travel was superfluous. Our twentieth century had inverted the story of Mohammed and the mountain; nowadays, the mountain came to the modern Mohammed."

The tie to chaos theory is pretty weak, but I love Borges, and especially love that story, and this was an excellent analysis of it.

A lot of (probably valid) criticism in these comments. Personally I find the comparison between strange attractors and hermeneutics really fun. I imagine the self-similarity in interpretations could be attributed to something akin to the "universal human experience". It's like we're iterating the hermeneutic circle... Whether or not that is something Borges intended I suppose is up to interpretation!

&gt; <i>I love Borges the author because he appears to have understood, at an intuitive literary level, deep truths about reality that physicists and mathematicians hadn&#x27;t even discovered in his time.</i><p>I doubt we need to go all the way to physicists and mathematicians.<p>&gt; <i>...Menard invented a whole new way to read, one where you deliberately imagine the text as written at a different time and by a different author, leading to radically different interpretations of the original text.</i><p>A simpler explanation is that Borges had some experience (don&#x27;t we all?) with partisans, reviewers, and even scholars, who seem wilfully to imagine their chosen text as written at a different time and by a different author than it had been.<p>[Given the nice discussion in TFA of changing connotations of symbols: are there genres beyond Country&amp;Western where the chorus stays syntactically the same but semantically changes after intervening verses? My current goto example is Husky&#x27;s &quot;I only Roll &#x27;Em&quot;, where the title is indeed the first line of the chorus, but the listener&#x27;s interpretation of &quot;roll&quot; and &quot;them&quot; changes over ~150 seconds. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=nK9nx7e9IGM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=nK9nx7e9IGM</a> ]

Not having read this Borges&#x27; short novel, I suspect OP might be seeing in it more than what&#x27;s there. But it still was a very nice read during along train commute.

I remember reading these passages and having the intellectual temptation of thinking in these lines. Ok but somehow a forced connection?

&gt; Borges was a meta-author (which also means that it&#x27;s impossible to spoil a Borges story).<p>&quot;The House of Asterion&quot; would beg to differ.

The comment about context is spot on; linguists call the mentioned phenomenon &quot;associative meaning&quot; after Leech (1981: 18).<p>The OP uses the Italian fascism symbol. Hitler&#x27;s appropriation of the symbol for the sun - taken from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism (and apparently in some places in Africa, too) - can also be used to explain it: it has forever changed the _associative meaning_ of it - and now the symbol (legally banned in Germany outside of historic educational&#x2F;research context) evokes images not of sun workship, but of the worst evils committed by mankind: gas chambers with scratch marks of human fingernail, human skin turned into lamp shades and piles of starved bodies, tens of millions dead one way or another (holocaust and WWII). That history leaves a sad, repulsive, shocking and painful memory imprinted on one&#x27;s brain (assuming one has some empathy and conscience), and seeing the symbol in the 19th century would be quite difference in comparison; this memory association cannot be &quot;un-thought&quot; (and as moral obligation, shouldn&#x27;t!).<p>On a related note, looking at the European elections, it is shameful and beyond believe that some want to turn back the clock (actual fascists) or to protest-vote like the folks did in the 1930s (coward followers).<p>Leech, Geoffrey N. (1981) _Semantics: The Study of Meaning_ (2nd ed.), London: Penguin).