Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges

A friend's ping suggested I read "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". The name sounded unusual. I looked it up and it was a short story by an Argentine author. Since the recommender was usually good with suggestions, I decided to try it out. Hence I ordered "Fictions" which contained this particular story. Not much later, I picked it up.

I lapped up Borges like a thirsty dog. I had been wanting to read something interesting for some time and all I had managed to pick up were Nietzsche and Woolf. After the tiresome descriptive readings that were laden with philosophies, Borges seemed unnaturally succinct and extremely gripping. It took me a while to get used to his style; the mild humour, the puns. At times I doubted whether what I was reading was fiction but the author made it evidently clear eventually.

There were a total of seventeen stories split up in two parts : "The Garden of Forking Paths" and "Artifices". The stories were altogether fantastic. Imaginary planets, impeccable memory, fateful lotteries; all these and more made up for some of the most pleasant reading that I have done till date. Moreover, the content was stimulating to an extent that I often put down the book to think how the author must have come up with such an incredible plot or how I might have gone about building on the same theme.

JLB was, in a word, awesome. He is a keeper for sure. One can pick him up between books or when does not have the time for bigger novels. A story roughly takes ten to twenty minutes to complete and leaves you slightly perplexed, slightly stimulated but mostly entertained and satisfied. Will look for more of his works for sure. But as of now, I will take a short break from reading.

Basic Writings of Nietzsche - Friedrich Nietzsche / Walter Kaufmann

Nietzsche is a well known name. But I had little idea what I was getting into when I had chosen this book in the flipkart liquidation sale. Since I had heard the name quite a few times and since the book was coming dirt cheap, I decided to go ahead with it. Picked it up more than a year later, though.

Nietzsche's works are probably the second blatantly philosophical work that I have read; the first being Aurelius' "Meditations". Nietzsche's proved to be an agitating philosophy. He is possibly more of a psychologist than a philosopher. He tends to explain things based on human psychology rather than come up with pleasant sounding irrational theorems. And his philosophy is indeed too far from pleasant. Also, it is easy to see why he is so widely misunderstood. He proclaims quite a few offending things without meaning offence, or so interprets Walter Kaufmann. But as far as I can see, Nietzsche is all about interpretation. If you like him, you will interpret his words differently from what you would if you dislike him. Nietzsche, as per his own writing, does not give a damn for those who do not understand him. The topics he touched upon seemed very personal to him as well as current for his time. In parts, it became unnecessarily verbose for the modern reader who does not share his perspective. Again, I doubt Nietzsche cared a lot about being 'eternal', though he did believe himself to be 'the destiny'.

This book five of his writings : "The Birth of Tragedy", "Beyond Good and Evil", "On the Genealogy of Morals", "The Case of Wagner", "Ecce Homo"; and a collection of aphorisms from his various essays. The compilation was quite beautiful in itself, showcasing a wide variety of Nietzsche's works throughout his 'career' as a writer. Walter Kaufmann seemed in total agreement with Nietzsche's philosophy and did a rather tedious job of pointing out every instance of disagreeable meaning or criticism that certain pieces of texts had received. But often, it seemed like a publicity for his other works regarding Nietzsche.

I will reserve my views regarding Nietzsche's philosophy for another post in Phantasmagoria. However, they rang with a certain degree of understanding and easily explained why intelligent brains over the years have read him time and again. Towards the end I started finding him tedious and pompous, though the arrogance and self importance had showed in every single work of his. "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" is another of his book that I will read. But not now. I have had enough of philosophy for quite some time, thank you.