The Immortal Borges ((better)) May 2026

The Immortal Borges: Labyrinths, Mirrors, and the Man Who Outlived Himself

In his story “The Immortal” (from The Aleph ), Borges tells of a Roman soldier who drinks from a cursed river and stops dying. He wanders the earth for centuries, forgetting his own name, living among primitive troglodytes — only to realize, eventually, that those grunting creatures are the immortals. They have no need for language, for memory, for love. Why write a poem when you have forever to write all poems? Why love one person when you can outlast every face? the immortal borges

So here is the secret Borges leaves us:

Not because he believed in an afterlife. He was famously skeptical. (“I am not an atheist,” he once said, “I am an agnostic. I am a man of doubt.”) No, Borges is immortal in the way a mirror is: he doesn’t die; he multiplies. The Immortal Borges: Labyrinths, Mirrors, and the Man

— For JLB, who is still dreaming us. Would you like a shorter version for Twitter/X or a Spanish translation of this post? Why write a poem when you have forever to write all poems

We don’t live forever. Instead, we live only in memory . And memory is Borges’s true labyrinth. It has no center. It has no exit. It is simply a corridor that folds back on itself, where your father is still young, where the book you haven’t written yet is already reviewed, where a blind Argentine man is smiling at you from across the century, saying: “Being immortal is unimportant; what matters is being remembered — and even that is a kind of fiction.” Read him. Reread him. Get lost. That’s the point.