19 pages • 38 minutes read
In Praise of Darkness
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Themes
Aging and Blindness
Borges explores the effect of aging on his eyesight in his poem “In Praise of Darkness.” This theme is introduced in the very first line: “Old age (the name that others give it)” (Line 1). For Borges, as with his father before him, old age comes with decreasing vision. As the years pass, the “darkness” (Line 6) increases. But the poem’s speaker does not fully identify with the phrase “old age,” which he describes as created by other people and only partially fitting to what he is experiencing. Receiving this phrase is like inheriting blindness from father to son. In other words, language and genetic legacy are linked.
The theme of aging is developed with the dimension of time. Borges repeats the word “time” in Lines 2 and 16. In Line 2, he argues that old age can be “the time of our greatest bliss,” defining the idea of time as a period in the life of a person. Robert Mezey’s translation emphasizes this meaning by changing the word “time” to “season.” In Line 16, time is a force that has power over vision. Borges metaphorically describes time as his Democritus, alluding to the legend that the ancient Greek philosopher blinded himself, just as aging has resulted in Borges losing his vision. Democritus ostensibly was hoping to sharpen his inner sight and block out the distractions of the outside world; the comparison personifies time, giving its destructive tendency agency and meaning, rather than accepting it as a mindless and purposeless force.
Borges also explores what is outside of time, or at the end of time. He compares the growing darkness in his vision to a penumbra that “flows down a gentle slope, / resembling eternity” (Lines 18-19). The word choice indicates that there is still some light—“penumbra” is only a partial shadow. It moves like liquid, developing the lunar imagery through the moon’s connection to the sea. Furthermore, to Borges, what is beyond time, in eternity, is darkness and ambiguity. Thomas E. Lyon argues that “Ambiguity relating to death and the possibility of an afterlife is a dominant motif in Borges’ work” (Lyon, Thomas E. “Intimations on a Possible Immortality”). Darkness is one kind of ambiguity, in that what is in the darkness is unclear.
The Presence of the Past
In addition to exploring the aging process, Borges describes being haunted by the past. The ongoing and inescapable presence of the past is often called hauntology by literary critics. In this poem, the speaker is haunted by the history of Buenos Aires, his hometown, which has “gone back to being” (Line 10) the way it used to be—because he can now only see it in his mind’s eye rather than registering any new development. The “rickety old houses” (Line 12) are divided into old barrios, or neighborhoods. The idea of return comes up several times in the poem. Not only does the city once more become its former barrios, but the speaker describes going blind as “a sweetness, a return” (Line 25). As his ability to distinguish facial features disintegrates, he returns to seeing people the way they used to look; for example, “women are what they were so many years ago” (Line 21), as their past identities haunt him in the present. The blending of past and present can also be seen in the blending of verb tenses in this line, which positions the present tense “are” alongside the past tense “were.” However, this kind of hauntology isn’t frightening.
The idea of return is also intimately linked with supernatural hauntings, or religious miracles. One path that Borges lists as part of his life experience is “resurrections” (Line 34), or a return to life after death. When referred to in the singular, the resurrection could refer to Jesus rising from the dead in the Bible. However, the plural form of “resurrections” makes this image more occult, referring now to the supernatural posthumous return of many people. Another listed path is “the acts of the dead” (Line 40). This is another example of the inescapable presence of the past. Multiple dead people, including Christ, haunt the speaker.
Relationship to Literature
The speaker’s relationship to texts is another important theme in the poem. As discussed in the previous section, the speaker is haunted by Christ’s resurrection, an important event from the Bible, which remains an influential text for Borges. Christianity is one of several philosophical references in the poem, where it is presented alongside the atomic theories of Greek philosopher “Democritus of Abdera” (Line 15) and Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Borges also alludes to other literature, including a reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and to the moon that appears frequently in “the Persian’s” (Line 39) poetry—an allusion that refers at once to the works attributed to Omar Khayyam and to Borges’s own earlier poem about Khayyam titled “Rubaiyat.”
As seen in many of his works, such as the short story “The Library of Babel,” Borges was heavily influenced by libraries. His father’s library probably contained the texts he lists directly and subtly alludes to in “In Praise of Darkness.” Borgesian libraries are known for being vast or infinite, and for often containing imaginary or impossible works. This connects to the speaker’s sense of being poorly read. Despite the diverse list of direct and indirect allusions, the speaker feels like he has barely scratched the surface of literature. He has only read a few “of the generations of texts on earth” (Line 26). This emphasizes how literature is a vast artifact of the past that can haunt the present.
However, Borges comes to terms with not being able to read more of the texts that have been produced throughout history. He finds bliss in rereading texts he has already read deeply enough to recall without sight. The act of “reading in my memory, / reading and transforming” (Lines 28-29) doesn’t involve visual consumption of books. Rather, it is reviewing the literature that he remembers. Memory is fallible, so the texts are transformed when he recalls them a little differently. Furthermore, contemplating a book repeatedly is a way to gain further insights into it, thus transforming it.
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By Jorge Luis Borges
