A Reader on Reading

Borges then goes on to tell the story. High on the peak of Mount Purgatory, Dante loses sight of Virgil. Led by Beatrice, whose beauty increases as they cross each new heaven, he reaches the Empyrean. In this infinite region, things far removed are no less clearly visible than those close by (“as in a PreRaphaelite canvas,” Borges notes). Dante sees, high above, a river of light, flocks of angels, and the Rose made from the souls of the just, arranged in orderly rows. Dante turns to hear Beatrice speak of what he has seen, but his Lady has vanished. In her place, he sees the figure of a venerable old man. “And she? Where is she?” Dante cries. The old man instructs Dante to lift his eyes and there, crowned in glory, he sees her high above him, in one of the circles of the Rose, and offers her his prayer of thanks. The text then reads (in Barbara Reynolds’s translation):

Such was my prayer and she, so distant fled,

It seemed, did smile and look on me once more,

Then to the eternal fountain turned her head.

Borges (always the craftsman) noted that “seemed” refers to the faraway distance but horribly contaminates Beatrice’s smile as well.

How can we explain these verses, Borges asks. The allegorical annotators have seen Reason or the Intellect (Virgil) as an instrument for reaching faith, and Faith or Theology (Beatrice) as an instrument for reaching the divinity. Both disappear once the goal is reached. “This explanation,” Borges adds, “as the reader will have noticed, is no less irreproachable than it is frigid; these verses were never born from such a miserable equation.”

The critic Guido Vitali (whom Borges had read) suggested that Dante, creating Paradise, was moved by a desire to found a kingdom for his Lady. “But I’d go further,” Borges says. “I suspect that Dante constructed literature’s best book in order to insert a few meetings with the unrecapturable Beatrice. Or rather, the circles of punishment and the southern Purgatory and the nine concentric circles and Francesca and the Siren and the Gryphon and Bertrand de Born are inserts; a smile and a voice, which he knows are lost, are what is essential.”

Then Borges allows us the ghost of a confession: “That an unhappy man should imagine happiness is in no way extraordinary; all of us do so every single day. Dante too does it as we do, but something, always, allows us to glimpse the horror behind these happy fictions.” He continues, “The old man points to one of the circles of the lofty Rose. There, in a halo, is Beatrice; Beatrice whose eyes used to fill him with unbearable beatitude, Beatrice who used to dress in red gowns, Beatrice of whom he had thought so much that he was astonished to learn that certain pilgrims, whom he saw one morning in Florence, had never even heard of her, Beatrice who once cut him cold, Beatrice who died at the age of twenty-four, Beatrice de Folco Portinari who had married Bardi.” Dante sees her and prays to her as he would pray to God, but also as he would pray to a desired woman.

O thou in whom my hopes securely dwell,

And who, to bring my soul to Paradise,

Didst leave the imprint of thy steps in Hell.

Beatrice then casts her eyes on him for a single moment and smiles, and then turns forever towards the eternal fountain of light.

And Borges concludes, “Let us retain one indisputable fact, a single and

humble fact: that this scene was imagined by Dante. For us, it is very real; for him, it was less so. (Reality, for him, was the fact that first life and then death had snatched Beatrice away). Absent for ever from Beatrice, alone and perhaps humiliated, he imagined the scene in order to imagine himself with her. Unfortunately for him, fortunately for the centuries that would read him, his knowledge that the encounter was imaginary deformed the vision. That is why the atrocious circumstances take place — so much more infernal, of course, because they take place in the highest heaven, the Empyrean: Beatrice’s disappearance, the old man who takes her place, her sudden elevation to the Rose, the fleeting smile and glance, the everlasting turning away.”

I am wary of seeing in one man’s reading, however brilliant that reading might be, a reflection of his own self; as Borges would no doubt argue, in his defense of the reader’s freedom to choose and to reject, not every book serves as a mirror for every one of its readers. But in the case of the Nine Essays I think the inference is justified, and Borges’s reading of Dante’s destiny helps me read that of Borges. In a short essay published in La Prensa in 1926, Borges himself had stated: “I’ve always said that the lasting aim of literature is to display our destinies.”