ABSTRACT
One of my favorite stories is “The Aleph” by Jorge Luis Borges. It is a story about obsessive memory, and in the story Borges muses about his life and ambition as an artist, writer, and poet. As a young man he falls in love with a very beautiful women by the name of Beatrice (she is called Beatriz in the Borges story) but she has no interest in him. He loves her desperately for years. In time she dies tragically and he is heartbroken by the realization that he has never been able to gain her love. So every year on the anniversary of her death he meets for dinner with Beatrice’s cousin, trying to find out more about what she was like when she was young—just any tidbit of information he might learn about her. But each time Borges meets with the cousin—I believe his name was Daneri —her cousin only wants to talk about poetry and literature. This pattern continues for a number of years. And although Borges really finds this man quite boring, he puts up with it for the sake of the memory of Beatrice.
