Works Cited

Before his blindness, Borges was so shy that, on the few occasions when he was asked to lecture, he sat on the stage while someone else read the text...

Readers will immediately notice that the same phrases, sentences, paragraphs and on occasion, pages recur throughout the book. The first reaction may well be that Borges, who was earning his living by writing hundreds of articles for diverse publications, was merely cutting corners by repeating himself. This is quite clearly not the case... Borges nearly always uses the same sentence to make a different point, or as a bridge between points C and D that are not the points A and B that were linked the last time the sentence was used. The repetitions are part of his lifelong fascination with the new way old elements can be reassembled, by chance or design to create new variations, something entirely different, or something that is exactly the same but now somehow different.

Eliot Weinberg, Preface to Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions