Read the theories of two contemporary authors on how Argentine writer and librarian Jorge Luis Borges “pre-figured” the World Wide Web. Perla Sassón-Henry’s “Borges 2.0: From Text to Virtual Worlds” is now available and “Cy-Borges: Memories of Posthumanism in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges” by Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus (Bucknell University Press), is forthcoming shortly.
By 1955 Borges had lost his sight yet was appointed director of the National Library of Argentina. Assessing his predicament (the digital age predicament) of having access to so much information and so few ways to process it, Borges wrote in “Poem of the Gifts,” “No one should read self-pity or reproach into this statement of the majesty of God, who with such splendid irony granted me books and blindness at one touch.”
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