In her landmark book on embracing pain and chaos, Pema Chödrön asked a critical question: "Could our minds and hearts be big enough just to hang out in that space where we're not entirely certain about who's right and who's wrong?"

Chödrön thought yes, as long as a dialogue keeps "our hearts and minds open." Or what Argentine essayist, short-story writer, and poet Jorge Luis Borges called simply an "exchange of thoughts."

The exchange of thoughts is a condition necessary for all love, all friendship, and all real dialogue. Two men who can speak together enrich and broaden themselves indefinitely. What comes forth from me does not surprise me as much as what I receive from the other.
From Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, 1968

Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986) did not so much write or converse as use the extraordinary powers of language to unscramble and unlock the imaginary worlds and creatures that resided in his boundless mind.   When Jorge Luis Borges was invited to deliver academic lectures at Harvard University in 1967 - a period during which his interviewer Richard Durbin met him - Robert Lowell, a tremendously influential American poet and Harvard Fellow, remarked, "It would be impertinent for me to praise him. For many years I've thought he should have won the Nobel Prize."

The Last Interview and Other Conversations includes the 1985 interview Borges gave to Argentine journalist Gloria Lopez Lecube weeks before Borges died. Additionally, there were conversations between Borges and graduate student Richard Burgin when Borges was a lecturer at Harvard University, whom Borges credits as "helping me know myself."

One of the many pleasures the stars (in which I don't believe) have granted me is in the literary and metaphysical dialogue. Since both these designations run the risk of seeming a bit pretentious, I should clarify that dialogue for me is not a form of polemics, of monologue or magisterial dogmatism, but of shared investigation.

[...]

Rereading these pages, I think I have expressed myself, in fact, confessed myself, better than in those. I have written in solitude with excess care and vigilance. The exchange of thoughts is a condition necessary for all love, all friendship and all real dialogue. Two men who can speak together enrich and broaden themselves indefinitely. What comes forth from me does not surprise me as much as what I receive from the other.
From Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, 1968

Borges was such a mind, such a person. He collected things unusual, like mythical creatures. His work knitted together stories and traditions from multiple cultures and languages. Yet he speaks to everyone because his work exists at that universal metaphysical level of being.   Consider this pristine moment of metaphysical self-awareness in Annie Dillard's profoundly observational evocation A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: "I am sitting under a sycamore by Tinker Creek. I am really here, alive on the intricate earth under the trees."

[T]hey take the universe for granted. They take things for granted. They take themselves for granted. That's true. They never wonder at anything, no? They don't think it's strange that they should be living. I remember the first time I felt that was when my father said to me, "What a queer thing," he said, "that I should be living, as they say, behind my eyes, inside my head. I wonder if that makes sense?" And then, it was the first time I felt that, and then instantly I pounced upon that because I knew what he was saying. But many people hardly understand that. And they say, "Well, but where else could you live?"
From Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, 1968

Jorge Luis Borges in 1951 by Argentine photographer Grete Stern. Learn more.

While there is a constant contemplation of the universe, Borges' writing also contains a miniaturization of things, a close focus that allows us to transpose the universal into the everyday.   This celebration of the miniature is important to me; in fact, my very first post, The Latent Greatness of Small Things, was about keeping an eye to the small. The meaning of the small comes in many forms. From Gerald Durrell's trenchant observation of insects to Rachel Carson's urgent call to notice the cellular connection of all life to Durga Chew-Bose, who argued that self-miniaturization improves self-awareness.  
Seeing things "small" in their own right helps us step apart from our inclined human-centric view; it expands our emotions and self-awareness. Borges would be the unlikely leader of this illustrious, imagined group, all fitted with ceremonial microscopes and magnifying glasses.

You see, I was always very shortsighted, so when I think of my childhood, I think of books and the illustrations in books. I suppose I can remember every illustration in Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi and so on. And the illustrations in the Arabian Nights. And Dickens - Cruikshank and Fisk illustrations.

Of course, well, I also have memories of being in the country, of riding horseback, I remember my parents and the house with the large patio and so on. But what I chiefly seem to remember are small and minute things. Because those were the ones that I could really see.   The multi-talented biologist and writer Rachel Carson once attributed childrens' enormous and unfettered sense of wonder at the natural world to the fact thta children are closer to the ground, more able to see shells and snails and insects alike. And in many ways they are allowed to have that boundless imagination.
From Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, 1968

In The Last Interview, Borges acknowledges suffering from insomnia, being terrified of mirrors, and having a life-long fascination with labyrinths. He credits these distinctions as directing his gaze towards the profundity of the minute. His short stories, poetry, and essays wondered about being, existence, and the meaning of death.

Of the many things I find comforting in Borges—his love of Dickens, a childhood illustrated by Mark Twain, his observation of the small—his view on death is the most comforting. Borges looks at death without metaphor.   We use metaphors to express the inexpressible, to add a visual to the unseeable (vision being our primary sense and mode of processing information). We use metaphors to give deeply abstract meaning to completely rational things, like stars.  
Death is a visual problem. We cannot visualize it, so we cannot comprehend it. Nabokov called a post-death existence "walls of darkness." Using a metaphor creates an irrational image like "walls of darkness" when the reality, death, is quite rational.  
Read more about the limits of metaphor from Susan Sontag's seminal Illness as Metaphor.

Infinity is an intellectual problem. Death means you stop being, you cease from thinking, or feeling, or wondering, and at least you're lucky in that you don't have to worry. You might as well worry, as the Latin poet said, about the ages, and ages that preceded you when you did not exist. You might as well worry about the endless past as the endless future uninhabited by you.
From Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, 1968

Although Borges uses imagery often, on death, he doesn't. He states, "I have no difficulty imagining that even as I go to sleep every night, I may have a long sleep at the end." That is death as precisely as we, those alive, will ever understand it.

Borges's few but precise words on blindness best illustrate his oddly beautiful mind and the root of his imagination.

Borges: The first colors I lost were black and red, which means that I am never in darkness. At first, this was a little uncomfortable. Then I was left with the other colors; green, blue and yellow, but green and blue faded into brown and then the yellow disappeared. Now no colors are left, just light and movement.

Lopez Lecube: You once said that blindness was a gift bestowed upon you so that people would like you.

Borges: Well, that's how I try to think, but believe me ...

Lopez Lecube: It didn't make you angry?

Borges: Believe me: the benefits of blindness have been greatly exaggerated. If I could see, I would never leave the house, I'd stay indoors reading the many books that surround me. Now they're as far away as Iceland, although I've been to Iceland twice and I will never reach my books. And yet, simultaneously, the fact that I can't read obliges me...

Lopez Lecube: To connect with the world?

Borges: No, not to connect with the world, no. It obliges me to dream and imagine...
From The Last Interview with Gloria Lopez Lecube, 1985

Borges died soon after he gave The Last Interview with Lopez Lecube. Perhaps that is why I keep a mind on death when I read this book.

England at sunset. Photo by nature photographer Joshua Burch

I can't help thinking of how other writers coped with death pending, captured meticulously in Katie Roiphe's The Violet Hour.

And I can't help but wonder whether Borges saw violet in all of his light and movement.