This was good. It's seven lectures that Borges gave in seven nights in Buenos Aires in 1977 (that's a lot of sevens). But it felt more like it was me an Borges sitting in a small room across from each other. He started talking to me about The Divine Comedy: Inferno; Purgatorio; Paradiso and urged me to shed my fears and read the book. He said I would greatly be enriched. So I told him ok, I will. I was a still a bit intimidated by his presence and at that point would have stuck my hand in boiling water if he told me to. Then he started talking about nightmares and I started to loosen up a bit. This guy had some pretty crazy nightmares and it turns out that one of his friends and me shared a certain kind of nightmare... dreams that try to encompass infinity. I wanted to ask questions but he continued on by talking about the book Tales from a Thousand and One Nights and my mouth just hung open. He said he had the complete volumes but would never get to read all of them. Just knowing they were there gave him comfort. And then he went on to Buddhism and my world started spinning. He made me question too many of my foundations... I wanted to scream but he was relentless never giving me a chance to take a breath. This topic more than any he shared with me that night haunted me. Luckily he switched over to the topic of Poetry and I started to relax a little. And then it was on to the Kabbalah and I had to stifle a yawn. It was getting late. I was tired. And I couldn't get Madonna's vision out of my head. But when he told me he was going to wrap up this little talk by discussing Blindness, I perked up. I sat there looking at this old kindly man. I was probably just a greenish or bluish blob in his eyes but I'm sure he noticed that this blob didn't move. He spoke of blindness as being a gift. He said it taught him so much. He ended our time together with a line of Goethe: Alles Nahe werde fern (everything near becomes distant). 'Goethe', he said, 'was referring to the evening twilight. Everything near becomes distant. It is true. At nightfall, the things closest to us seem to move away from our eyes. So the visible world has moved away from my eyes, perhaps forever.'

An excellent book. ( )

Borges as Coleridge loved to talk. Many times met at Bioy Casares home with other writers and intellectuals and to share - and listen - many ideas and stories. This love for the spoken word appears in his lectures as is shown in this book.

In seven nights, he addresses an audience with something more personal than what may appear - as Coleridge did - poetry, Dante's Divine Comedy, metaphors, Arabian nights, are some of the themes that he appreciated most of his life and of he spoke on those nights.

For any Borges reader or any person which desires to understand what is poetry or to have a glimpse of the mind of one of the best writers of the twentieth century, this is an excellent work. ( )