Episode 308: The Gray Man who Dreamed (Borges' "Shakespeare's Memory")

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes. This is not a new world. It is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history.

[00:00:30] Since the beginning of time.

[00:01:21] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, your LA Lakers have their backs to the wall down 3-1 to the Timberwolves. Be honest, does some part of you just want it to be over? Yes. It didn't even take me that long to realize it. Like, just put us out of our misery. This is terrible. This is like a manufactured team that was like poorly manufactured, you know? I think in the long run it could work out for you to have Luka, but…

[00:01:50] When LeBron leaves. Yeah. He's been good though. He's been really good. It's just the Timberwolves are really good. Yeah. Well, they have heart. Yeah, that's right. And they play defense. Yeah, and they play defense. And you know what? LeBron, like putting aside my LeBron hatred, he's 40. Like we can't expect that much, you know? Like we can't like be like, oh yeah, he's going to carry our team. The guy's doing shit that no other athlete in the history of this sport has ever done.

[00:02:17] And he was incredible in the end of the last game. Now, he didn't score, but he had two like unbelievable defensive plays. Yeah. And our coach played him for all of these hires. And what is like the most inexplicable decision making ever. And Luka too, you know? Like he's trying to sleep one off, you know? He had like a 12 pack of old Milwaukee the night before. Oh God. But your Celtics are looking like...

[00:02:45] Yeah, we're looking good. The magic are a pain in the ass. We all want to just be done with them. I do love how almost violent these playoffs have been. Yeah, totally. It really reminds me of the early 90s. Yeah. No, it's been like the best first round series. I mean, this isn't... we should move on. But this has been so good. And I rarely watch like as many games that aren't Celtics games. But a lot of these series, they're just fun to watch. And yeah, the refs are letting them play.

[00:03:13] Yeah. Multiple potential career ending injuries occurring. Yeah. Just shake it off. All right. So today, we're not going to talk NBA. Although... No. So in the first segment, you, as always, want to get political. And we're going to talk about a recent incident of a cancellation at Cornell University.

[00:03:35] And then in the second segment, we are going to return to Borges and talk about his story, Shakespeare's Memory, which might have been the last story he ever wrote. And it is definitely in his last collection of stories. And also, Everything and Nothing, which is his tribute to Shakespeare that is... we're not sure exactly what to call it. An essay, a poem, a short story, or a literary sketch. It could be any of those.

[00:04:04] Yeah. But both really great. And I'm excited for that conversation. Yeah. But first, yeah, let's talk cancellation, cancel culture. You know that like, if I want to talk about this, that like, I'm pissed. And this would just really piss me off. And I kind of knew when we were talking opening segments like what to do, I kind of just always in the back of my mind knew I couldn't help myself but like say, can you just let me talk about this? Because Cornell has just disappointed me. Right.

[00:04:30] But so the context is, Cornell has, you know, I'm sure this is true of a lot of school, but Cornell has specifically made itself, I don't know, given itself credit, a lot of credit and preached a lot about being pro-free speech. Our new president, Mike Kotlikoff, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times published March 31st that was titled, Universities Like the One I Run Aren't Afraid to Let People Argue.

[00:04:56] Now, I know he doesn't pick the title, but as I was telling you offline, it's as insufferable as the title makes it sound. Yeah. Where it's like this self-congratulatory piece. So he says, Cornell University recently hosted an event that any reputable PR firm would surely have advised against. Oh, God. On a calm campus in a semester unroyed by protest, we chose to risk stirring the waters by organizing a panel discussion that brought together Israeli and Palestinian voices with an in-person audience open to all.

[00:05:27] Now, I have to say, I like Mike Kotlikoff, our president. I know him a little bit. You're good friends. Well, almost. So every year, Cornell hosts a end-of-the-year concert where we try to bring in like a fairly famous singer of some sort, like an act. We've had more or less famous people like Snoop Dogg one year, TI one year, whatever. You know, some years more famous than others. This year, they had hired, they had booked an R&B singer named Kalani.

[00:05:57] Now, Kalani is an R&B singer I've never heard of, like until this moment. But apparently, she's been pretty vocal about being opposed to Israel's actions in Palestine and just generally being pro-Palestine. I guess a group of our students at Cornell thought that this was anti-Semitic and that we were promoting hate speech. Now, I would never have predicted how quickly and easily our administration folded.

[00:06:23] A few days ago, we got an email saying that they had rescinded the invitation to this singer Kalani. And in the email, the president says, Unfortunately, although it was not the intention, the selection of Kalani as this year's headliner has injected division and discord into Slope Day. For that reason, I am rescinding Kalani's invitation and expect a new lineup for a great 2025 Slope Day to be announced shortly. In the day since Kalani was announced, I have heard grave concerns from our community that many are angry, hurt, and confused

[00:06:51] that Slope Day would feature a performer who has espoused anti-Semitic, anti-Israel sentiments in performances, videos, and on social media. While any artist has the right in our country to express hateful views, Slope Day is about uniting our community, not dividing it. So to be clear, like, she hasn't been accused of anything anti-Semitic besides being critical of Israel and what they're doing in Gaza right now. Like, that's just assumed to be anti-Semitic.

[00:07:19] And there's literally not another thing that they can point to besides that. It's just so fucking, it's so infuriating. To quote back from our president's op-ed, Do many in our academic community disagree with what those speakers had to say? Speakers, I'll tell you about in a second. Sure. And that is in large part the point. Universities cannot be allowed to become echo chambers. If they do, they've lost their purpose. And in this op-ed, he refers to Ann Coulter, who was invited to give a talk here, got shouted down.

[00:07:48] And so they invited her back to speak again to make sure that she was actually heard. They invited Mark Bowerlane, a prominent critic of DEI, Ken Davis of the Federalist Society. He's like saying how proud he is. These just all conservatives. But to make sure to balance it out, he says, and we also recently hosted Angela Davis, a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. We even had a black woman. Yeah, so what a crazy controversial person Angela Davis.

[00:08:14] The fact that he just did an about-face so quickly and just so egregiously because, as you were saying, somebody who says that they're against the actions of Israel is all of a sudden hateful and anti-Semitic, is just such bullshit and such hypocrisy that really what pisses me off so much is that we're ever pretending to anything other than this. Yeah, and I'm sure Barry Weiss and all the free press, free speech warriors are up in arms over this. All right, no. Right.

[00:08:44] Oh, no, that's right. You're allowed to cancel people for this one reason, but that's it, being critical of Israel. Honestly, like this is like unparalleled gaslighting right now that's going on. The conflating of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism and being critical of Israel. Israel, who they've killed thousands and thousands of women and children. They're engaged, according to like a lot of scholars of genocide, including some Israeli scholars of the Holocaust. They call it a genocide.

[00:09:13] Like to be critical of that is to be anti-Semitic. It's just, it's so shameful for me like as a Jewish person. It's so dishonorable. Drives me fucking crazy. Like they're literally abducting people off the street and sending them to a Louisiana prison because they co-authored an op-ed saying like we shouldn't sell arms to Israel. I mean, it's just, it's unbelievable. Yeah. No, it's an absolute disrespect to any Jewish person who's against the actions of Israel.

[00:09:41] So, um, Khelani responded, by the way, like I think yesterday, maybe on her Instagram saying calling me anti-Semitic is ridiculous. But specifically mentioned that she had early on worked with a, uh, I forget the name of the organization of Jewish people against, that she worked with to speak out against, uh, the, the, the actions of Israel. Oh, Jewish voice for peace. Yeah. That one. Right.

[00:10:04] I would be so upset if somebody called my speaking hateful and anti-Semitic, um, because you're opposed to literally the military actions of a state, right? I mean, what other state can you be accused of hate for, like, if you're against Russia, do you hate all Russians? Like, it doesn't make any sense. Like, it's so infuriating. Like in Texas, new hires, they started this, I'm pretty sure after I was hired, so I never had to do this.

[00:10:31] But this is at all public, like, institutions. You have to sign pledges to not do BDS, you know, boycott, divest, sanctions of Israel, of a foreign state. It's like we're fucking cucks for Israel. It's, it's such a disgrace. Like, like anytime there's some petition not in our name for writers or academics or anything like that, I sign it because I just want no part of this.

[00:10:56] Like, I find it, like, it's, it hurts me not just because of the immorality of it, but yeah, the, just the lack of any kind of dignity. And of course, it, all it does is further anyone who had the idea that maybe powerful, rich Jews and Israel have an outsized influence over our institutions. I mean, at this point, that's not a conspiracy anymore. That's just like the plain facts in front of our eyes. And it's like, yeah, and it's also really like scary that way.

[00:11:26] Yeah, it's scary, shameful, disgraceful. All the words that you said and absolutely gaslighting. I just want to read you this part from the op-ed. By the way, they were going to make her sign or they had made this artist sign something saying that she wouldn't make political statements when she performed.

[00:11:56] Right. Like, uh, what's that band, that Irish band? U2. Uh, uh, at Coachella kneecap, uh, where they were like, fuck Israel, stop the genocide or whatever. So Cornell didn't want any part of that. And that's fine, you know? And I know, like, I have no issue with Cornell getting them to say, just don't at this event. And I know what people will respond to this, which is that the president said that they would host reasoned debate.

[00:12:25] But this isn't a reasoned debate. This is just a singer. But that's, that's such bullshit. I think it's bullshit. That's a hundred percent bullshit. You know that this was because a group of people pretended that this could be considered hateful or anti-Semitic. And there's a lot of money and a lot of political pressure to honor those things, to cave to them, to submit to it, to just surrender all your dignity when confronted with it. It's just, yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:53] There was a group of PhD graduate students in Cornell's music department that wrote an op-ed, I think, in the Cornell Daily Sun saying like, that this is like bullshit and shameful. And that, you know, again, it's a using, using different rules. So apparently in 2005, when we invited Snoop Dogg, a group of people said like, hey, we don't want Snoop here. His lyrics are misogynist. Like he's anti-woman.

[00:13:16] And what they did was host a series of events like, you know, around the day of the concert where people could talk about this, where there would be like forums to discuss whatever misogyny in music. So it's not like we haven't had controversy with artists before. Artists, a lot of artists are controversial and have opinions that are offensive to some subset of people.

[00:13:41] And it just seems like if the spirit of Cornell's administration, if the spirit of what they're trying to communicate is really going to be upheld, they should have at least tried to do something like that. And honestly, what's wrong with listening to an artist whose opinions politically you don't like? Like I do that all the time. Just fucking develop some skin about this. This op-ed is unbelievable. Isn't it?

[00:14:07] Was I surprised when the discussion was almost immediately interrupted by protest? Disappointed, yes, but not surprised or deterred. We had expected it and we were prepared. Oh my God. It's so bad. It's so bad. Who writes that way? What editor let him write? If Cornell were a business, we might have called the event a failure. The news coverage displayed only the disruption and ignored the rest. Fortunately for our students, Cornell is not a business.

[00:14:36] We are a university and universities, despite rapidly escalating political, legal and financial risks, cannot afford to cede the space of public discourse and the free exchange of ideas. Yeah. I mean, this is so bad, even if you hadn't then betrayed every part of it like two weeks later. Oh, man. I know. I know. The fact that it's so close in proximity makes it just like, wow. Like, what happened?

[00:15:04] You know, he's literally, genuinely, like, I think, been principled or at least stuck to his guns. Like, I don't know if principled, but consistent. And, like, he just bent the knee, I guess. Yeah. It's probably a fairly thankless job, except that you get paid like a million and a half dollars or whatever. But he was our provost before. And I've been in meetings with him where, like, you know, people would come just so angry and yelling at him. And he always just, like, took it in stride.

[00:15:30] But, yeah, I think that's the job of the provost and probably president is to eat shit from, like, the politicians and the board. The board. The board. Yeah. This is the end of it. Only by defending democratic values and norms and educating our students to carry them forward in all their complexity and challenge, and challenge, will we safeguard the future of our institutions and our nation.

[00:16:01] Oh, God. He should, like, this is like a seppuku, like. Yeah, it is. A moment. But, like, also, again, with the questions, do many in our academic community disagree with what those speakers had to say? Sure. Can you just talk normally? Yeah. You just want to, like, do, like, a Humphrey Bogart, like, slap him thing, you know? What's wrong with you? Right? Like a normal person.

[00:16:32] What's wrong with saying many in our academic community disagree with what those speakers had to say? Get an editor. I'm sure this was edited to death. Oh, God. But it is hilarious. Ann Coulter, Mark Borlin, Ken Davis of the Federalist Society. Also, Angela Davis. Yeah.

[00:16:51] It is kind of also unbelievable, this op-ed, because the thing that he's so proud about is just a panel discussion about with Israel and Palestinian voices. Like, I know. It just goes to show, like, how this new normal is so fucking batshit that to have a panel discussion of two people who disagree on what is obviously something that a lot of people disagree about. Yeah. Right? Like... And that in no way is something that shouldn't be debated.

[00:17:21] Like, it's just insane. I mean, in one sense it shouldn't be debated, but, like, that it is. Well, right. Yes. Yeah. There is kind of an indefensible side and a defensible side. But, unfortunately, like, the debate would just be to get the defensible side heard. It's just ridiculous. What also, just moving of the goalposts.

[00:17:43] We went from, like, are you really supporting October 7th to, like, well, now you're just anti-Semitic if you disagree with anything. You're pro-Hamas. You're pro-Hamas. Yeah. And it's just, like, it's been like that, honestly. Like, obviously it's worse right now with Trump and especially with the international people, anyone who's not literally a citizen for now. But, like, this was all happening under Biden, too. There was the crackdown on the protests.

[00:18:10] Donors forcing universities to suspend all these students and fire any professors that were. That was just a more sanitized version of what's happening now. And it's just, yeah. I guess if there's one positive thing to take from this, it's that as the repression gets this absurd and this, like, over the top, it's just a sign that this is unsustainable.

[00:18:33] That we're going to have to have this be part of the political conversation, whether we continue to support this or not. And it's always been this thing that has been very marginalized up till, you know, the last five or ten years. But now there's just too much out there. And they're having to resort to the kind of tactics they never had to resort to before. Yeah.

[00:18:58] Hopefully that means that there's some kind of reckoning is coming and we can have honest debate about this. And stop calling people who are anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic. It's an insult to Holocaust victims. It's an insult to Jews. Even though a lot of the times it's Jews that are doing it. And it's, yeah, it's immoral and it's dishonorable. All right. Well, Kalani, you're an R&B artist I'd never heard of, but I already miss you. All right.

[00:19:28] We'll be back to talk about Borges Shakespeare's memory and everything and nothing.

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[00:23:29] All right, let's get back to Borges, and it's so good to be back. It's my happy place. Yeah, we haven't done one in a while, it feels like, almost a year. That might not be true. In any case, we're going to talk about one of his last stories, possibly the last story he ever wrote in the 80s, like, I think 1983, first published in Spanish, Shakespeare's Memory. And we'll also be referring to this piece that he wrote much earlier, Everything and Nothing,

[00:23:58] that is, I guess, a reflection on Shakespeare, the man, and his life. Very short. It's like a page at most. It's really not clear what it is, like genre-wise. And I've seen it referred to as short story, as an essay, and as a poem. And also as a literary conceit. No. A sketch. A literary sketch. That's the one that seems right. Yeah.

[00:24:25] So both of these are in their own way about Shakespeare, but also about so many other things. And before we get started, I want to give a shout out to my grad student, Alex, who, when I was doing my Borges class, he was one of the students in there. I did a seminar on Borges and philosophy, and he kept bugging me to read Shakespeare's Memory. And I always, because I already had all these other stories I wanted to do, just kind of put it off. And it's great. It's so good.

[00:24:55] But, and it's very boring. Even though he wrote it like 40 years after he wrote a lot of his other stories that we've done, it's just a classic Borges story. It's so Borgesian. Yes. That's the word. Yeah. I loved it. So thank you, Alex. So the plot, in like two sentences, a man who is a Shakespeare scholar. He's a fussy little Shakespeare scholar who, he's German. This is in the 20s or 30s. And he's offered the opportunity to have Shakespeare's memory.

[00:25:25] William Shakespeare's memory. And it is like, you know, like the videotape in The Ring. It's this thing that is passed along from one person to another. Only one person can have it at a time. And there's like a ritual for transferring it for one person to the other. And so this Shakespeare scholar all of a sudden has Shakespeare's memory. And the story describes what that was like. And then by the end, he doesn't want it anymore.

[00:25:51] And he gives it up to somebody else who he just called on the phone. And that's the end of the story. And then Everything and Nothing is just like a little mini biography of Shakespeare, William Shakespeare. That's beautiful. And, you know, I think quite related, even though they're written 24 years apart. Yeah. That's one of the coolest things about reading Borges is across all of those years, he hits the same themes over and over again in different ways.

[00:26:20] And in ways that are never, they're never tiring. Like this is about memory, about identity, about what it means to be somebody. About art and the artist, you know. Yeah, exactly. And like you said, he's a Shakespeare scholar. And even the way he describes himself, he's like an unimportant one, really. Like it's kind of like a small man in some sense. Concerned with like marginalia, you know. Yeah. Like just stuff that only 10 people know or care about, you know.

[00:26:49] And so to be offered this crazy gift, of course he thinks like, wow, I could be an awesome Shakespeare scholar if I had all of Shakespeare's memories. Like I could write an entire biography of Shakespeare if I possessed his memories. If we want to start talking about themes, one of the themes I think is that this is a bit of a reductio ad absurdum of scholarship, historical scholarship on the life of artists, like great artists like Shakespeare.

[00:27:18] Like you have the ideal, you know, like if you looked at what would be the best thing that could happen to a scholar of a person, it's to literally have their memories. And it still doesn't make you like have insight into the art. Yeah. I think that's like a big theme of the story. Yeah, absolutely. Like it's at some point he realizes that although he has these autobiographical memories,

[00:27:45] what the man did with those memories by turning them into plays, pieces of art, he's missing. Yeah. Right. He's missing like the thing that makes the alchemy happen, you know, like, and I think that's connected to a lot of different other themes, like about the self and about memory. But I do think like the one that popped out at me the most is this distinction between the man and the artist.

[00:28:14] The art, there's like a dualism. And I think that's true in everything and nothing too. It's like men are men, like their bodies. Some of these men are artistic geniuses, but knowing about the man doesn't explain the genius and how that worked. It's like you said, there's that bridge from getting from this guy or woman to the great work. So there's this line, I think, that captures this in everything and nothing talking about Shakespeare.

[00:28:40] Thus, while his body in whorehouses and taverns around London lived its life as a body, the soul that lived inside it would be Caesar, who ignores the admonition of the Sybil, and Juliet, who hates the lark, and Macbeth, who speaks on the moor with the witches, who are also the fates and the three weird sisters. So it's like there's this body that's just doing the normal things that a man does,

[00:29:03] and then there's this soul, which I think he means metaphorically for just the thing that makes that art come out. Yeah. Yeah. Right. He says in Shakespeare's memory, he says,

[00:29:33] And I love that just description of memories of your life just being frail material. That's not enough to cause art to happen. I like what you said, the alchemy has to occur. Yeah. And it doesn't even really help to have memories. You get the sense. I mean, there's a few interesting things that it does. He learns a few things he's able to interpret, but there's this great line where he says, like, I published something saying that one of his sonnets was actually about the Spanish Armada,

[00:30:02] and he forgot that Samuel Butler already did that like 100 years earlier. So it's like, even though that was an insight for him that he probably wouldn't have had, someone had already come up with it already. Yeah, totally. So in the story, the person who gives him these memories was like just a guy that he meets through a mutual acquaintance who tells the story of how he acquired all of Shakespeare's memories. So Daniel Thorpe tells him, yeah, I got it during the war.

[00:30:29] Like there was this guy who was dying and in his last sort of dying words, he told me, I have Shakespeare's memories. All you have to do is say that you'll accept them and they'll be yours. And then he tells the narrator of the story. He says, look, they're not going to all come in at once. Like you're not going to all of a sudden have his memories. They'll come slowly and you can't force it. So like, don't construct memories. He's like, the memory has entered your mind, but it must be discovered. It will emerge in dreams or when you are awake. When you turn the pages of a book or turn a corner,

[00:30:58] don't be impatient. Don't invent recollections. Chance and its mysterious workings may help you along or it may hold you back. As I gradually forget, you will remember. I cannot tell you how long the process will take. Yeah, I love it. By the way, earlier, there's a phrase that I love, this turn of phrase. When he first introduces this character of Daniel Thorpe, who gives them the memories, he says, I was introduced to Thorpe by Major Barclay at a Shakespeare conference. I will not say where or when.

[00:31:25] I know all too well that such specifics are in fact vaguenesses. Yeah. I think that captures so nicely what it is to have the specific memories of Shakespeare is still vagaries. Like, it's not what you think. So yeah, slowly but surely. And here's the thing. Like, at first he can't be sure that he's gaining memories. Like, he's not quite sure what's actually a memory. But after a while, he gets them.

[00:31:49] Yeah, so then separate from it being Shakespeare, like, I think this story says a lot of interesting things about memories, just our own memories. Absolutely. And the nature of memories. So Shakespeare famously, when he was, I think, 18 years old, had sex with Anne Hathaway. And there's speculation that they had to get married. Now, she was 24 or 25 at the time. 26. Yeah, so she was much older than he was.

[00:32:19] And so the narrator says that he would remember Anne Hathaway as he remembered the mature woman who taught me the ways of love in an apartment in Lubeck so many years ago. But then as he tries to recall the woman, he can't picture her face. He can just picture, like, the wallpaper and the light that streamed in through the window. That's a beautifully accurate description of our memories where we think, like, these are meaningful occasions to us.

[00:32:49] But if we try to remember it, we just remember these weird details. And there are these big vaguenesses in the memory. And that's just our own memory, never mind somebody else's. Yeah. This made me think about what memory is. Because you think, and this gets to what you were saying about what scholarship is, like, you would think that you would be sort of endowed with a bunch of facts about someone's life if you had their memories. And in reality, that's like even just introspecting.

[00:33:18] That's not the content of my memory. Like, it's not like, oh, and in whatever 1981 I moved here. I mean, I guess I can pull it up, but it's not just, like, a list of things. It's these feelings, these vibes, these faces, these. And as he says at first, like, all the memories were auditory. And I don't know what you think of that, whether he was trying to make some claim about memories in general or how the process was going, that they first came in this auditory fashion. For instance, he finds himself reciting lines of Chaucer.

[00:33:48] Yeah, and singing a melody. And then, yeah, whistling a tune. Because that is what memories are. Like, that's what our minds are doing. Our minds aren't, like, focused on, I wonder what I meant when I wrote this, you know. Yeah. No, look, if my biographer had my memory, that's not going to help you that much to try to get to the bottom of who I am and what I do. And the magic that you and I are able to conjure through our conversations. But also, yes, that's true.

[00:34:17] Like, what this makes me think about how fragile memory is and how completely, like, impressionistic. And that's, to me, who is generally aware of the, like, major – like, we can organize our memories. Yeah. Yeah. And still, they're so fragmented and there are these big blotches. You know what – I thought the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind captured that when they would just show these people with, like, blank faces.

[00:34:47] Yeah. You know, and it's just, like, you can't picture – you can picture something else really well. Like, I can picture, like, something that happened in a room in Prague. Like, I remember the room, but I don't remember the person, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And that's just how it works. And all of that is somehow connected to, like, our conception of ourselves, too.

[00:35:09] Have you ever had that – the experience, like, with that vibe of your communicating of your memories, like, in this eternal, sunshiny sort of way being vague? Have you ever tried to reconstruct, like, facts, like, the order in which things happened or, like, where you were? Yeah. Like, what year was that conference that I met you? Like, that requires real work. Like, often it requires me to go to, like, my phone and see if there are any pictures from that conference. Right.

[00:35:38] Or else I'm just sort of shit out of luck. But I have little impressions. Yeah, of course. Like, when we went to dinner with Leanne Young and someone else, like, I can picture the booth that we were sitting in. Right, right. But, like – But ask me what year that was. Like, where – yeah. Yeah. No idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What talks did we listen to? Yeah, well, that's probably a more obvious reason why we can't remember that. He says – the narrator says – whose name is Herman, I guess – says,

[00:36:07] The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration. He acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things. Yeah. If that is the case with a concrete and relatively simple entity, given, I mean, the alphabetical order of its parts, etc., then what must happen with a thing which is abstract and variable? Endoyant et divers. Yeah. A dead man's magical memory, for example. Yeah. Like, and that's the gift. Like, maybe you'll be able to put some shit together.

[00:36:36] At one point, he calls memory – he says, memory is like a chaos of vague possibilities. That's such a good description of what memories can feel like. Like, okay, can we talk about the connection of memory and the self or memory and identity? There's this great line late in the story where – this is where he's starting to lose track of, like, who's Shakespeare.

[00:37:02] And, like, he sees all these trains at the station, but he doesn't know what trains are. And he says, at first the waters of the two memories did not mix. In time, the great torrent of Shakespeare threatened to flood my own modest stream. And very nearly did so. It's so good. And then he says, since personal identity is based on memory, I feared for my sanity. And I just love how he tosses that off. Just like, oh, yeah, personal identity is based on memory.

[00:37:32] Like, and then just – that's it. Like, he just drops it in there. Yeah. I think that's kind of interesting. It's not fully explored, but there are a bunch of hints as to what this is like. So when Thorpe gives him the memory, he says, what I possess are still two memories, my own personal memory and the memory of the Shakespeare that I partially am. Or rather, two memories possess me. There is a place where they merge somehow.

[00:38:02] There is a woman's face. I'm not sure what century it belongs to. So what do you think he's saying about the self and identity and its connection to memory? Man, I mean, like I literally, as I was taking notes, I just have – the only thing I wrote down is it's what happens to us all.

[00:38:20] And what I meant by that is that this thing of merging a different person's memory with yours and them mingling, where you start not realizing which memories were properly yours and which ones weren't yours, is it does feel like you're losing your identity. And the narrator says, De Quincey says that our brain is a palimpsest. Every new text covers the previous one and is in turn covered by the text that follows.

[00:38:46] But all powerful memory is able to exhume any impression no matter how momentary it might have been if given sufficient stimulus. And so for me it was like there's no way you can maintain a coherent separation between those two. Like now that you're having a memory of Shakespeare, it's you having a memory as well. And there is a real fear that you're losing the boundaries between you and this other person. And the only thing that can ground which one is which is like just brute facts of the matter, like when he doesn't know what a train is.

[00:39:15] So like him now finally recognizing the train as a signal that he's – That this must be one of the other guys' memories. He's Herman. Yeah, exactly. And then as I thought about it, I was like, well, as we just in general live lives and acquire memories, and our memories are a palimpsest as well, like rewriting our other memories, this is like what aging feels like to me.

[00:39:38] This is my new memories competing with the memories that I used to have, forgetting other memories that I used to have. And my identity, it does feel like it's based on memory, but I think to myself, it really feels like I am a different person than I used to be because I have not only created new memories, but have rewritten or written over the original memories. And I felt that struggle of identity about who I am based on this. Like a ship of Theseus kind of thing.

[00:40:08] Yeah, yeah. Like the old man does not – the old man remembers the young man. The young man remembers the boy. Yeah, that's the Thomas Reed and John Locke debate. So, yeah, I had the same response where it just kind of highlighted, A, how kind of – I don't know about fragile, maybe illusory the sense of self is because if you think about what your self is, it's like the sensations in your body and your awareness of where you are right now.

[00:40:36] And then just all your memories, you know, like short-term memories and then long-term memories. Those are the things that ground you, but as they become hazier and as more of them just pile up – and it's not like chronologically I'll still remember things from when I'm 12 and I'll forget like something that happened a week ago. So it's just a jumble of different memories. And sometimes the memory is just purely constructed by me. I mean they're always constructed.

[00:41:06] But sometimes they're just false. Like I don't know if I've told the story of when I was telling Eliza this story about me and my friend Ed when we got lost in a hotel and she was like, that was me with my friend Ali. Like I told you that story. And I had just invented that it was me. And it really does become as if it was an experience of yours. Yeah. Yeah. It's incredible.

[00:41:34] It's happened to me where like I'll stubbornly – I'm surprised that you like even – I think if it would have happened to me I would have like gotten into a huge argument with my daughter about whose memory it actually was. Like what's that story? The truth of fact, the truth of feeling. Exactly. Exactly. The Ted Chiang story. He says – the narrator says, as the years pass every man is forced to bear the growing burden of his memory. And he says, I staggered beneath two which sometimes mingled.

[00:41:59] And to me that was just like every man does have to deal to bear the growing burden of his memories as you acquire them, as we become older. It is like the only thing that's tying me in a continuous fashion to old me. And now there's all this stuff. And I actually – maybe I'm too sensitive but I wonder if this happens to you. Sometimes it hurts to not be able to remember something that I know happened. That somebody says, hey, remember in high school when we did this? And I'm like, no, I don't.

[00:42:28] I feel like I've like – some piece of me, some chunk of me has been removed. Or if somebody conversely doesn't remember an experience that we had together that was meaningful to me and they don't remember it. I'm like, oh, man. I get like a little vertigo but that happens to me all the time. Because I also have – I have some friends that will remember like every little thing it seems like that happened from – in high school or college or whenever it is. And I'm just not like that.

[00:42:55] Like I have really specific sporadic memories from like 30 years ago or whenever. But I don't like have a very good memory about all that stuff. And I've come to terms with it. You've come to – But there are times. And usually it's something a little more recent than that where somebody will tell me something. Like from when I was at University of Minnesota Morris, for example. So maybe like 17 years ago or something like that. And I just have no memory of it.

[00:43:23] And yeah, I get a little like, wait. So what am I then? Well, was this – yeah. I was here for 10 years or whatever. And it's like, what do I have left in my mind that represents this? And I think, you know, obviously I'm through my practice of meditation and all this – the Buddhist and other kind of reading about, you know, non-dual conceptions of the self.

[00:43:51] I already kind of believe that the self is an illusion and all this does is give more support for that view. And I think Borges himself, that also comes out in Borges. I think he – you know, like when you're talking about Shakespeare, like you're talking about just this flow of –

[00:44:13] I don't want to say information, but this flow of something that, you know, leads to this kind of ordinary guy that reads a lot of great literature and is able to somehow transmute that into, you know, like unparalleled masterpiece after unparalleled masterpiece. And then just retires and goes back to being an ordinary guy that worries about debt and worries about, you know, like love affairs.

[00:44:41] And there's not a real clear continuum. And so, like at the end of Everything and Nothing, Shakespeare talks to God. So, this is how it ends. He says, history adds that before or after he died – before or after. I love that. That before or after he died, he discovered himself standing before God and said to him, I, who have been so many men in vain, wish to be one, to be myself.

[00:45:08] God's voice answered him out of a whirlwind, like Job. I, too, am not I. I dreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your own work. And among the forms of my dream are you who, like me, are many, yet no one. So, it's pretty explicit there almost. It's just like Shakespeare is part of this wave that just came out of God, but God considered, I think, here very abstractly. Yeah. We're many and no one.

[00:45:35] He's everybody he read and met and his experiences and also none of those things. It's just words can describe that differently. Yeah. In the Everything and Nothing, he talks about having this sort of sense that there was nothing in him, which is, you know, like you could read it as there's something wrong with Shakespeare, right? Like, so sometimes we've alluded to this reading of what an actor is, like an actor is portraying so many different people that he can't, that he doesn't develop his own self. And so you could read it that way.

[00:46:05] But the realization truly is that we are all nothing. We are all the content of whatever it is. You know, Shakespeare was creating these characters and inhabiting them as an actor. And that was satisfying to him because he could pretend that he was an actual person. But the people that he was pretending to be probably had that same feeling in them that they were empty. So we are all just layers of pretense. Yeah. All the way up to God, who doesn't know who he is either. Right.

[00:46:34] Who's also everyone and no one. Yeah. Yeah. I do love this sort of treatment of Shakespeare as somebody who was motivated by, like, kind of a fear, like that other people might be real people and he wasn't. And that this is what motivates him to create these, like, amazing literary works so that he can portray them on stage. So that he can, during the duration of the play, be Caesar. Yeah. But then he's hit with such disappointment at the end, right? When the curtain goes down. Yeah.

[00:47:01] It says, instinctively, he had already trained himself to the habit of feigning that he was somebody so that his nobodiness might not be discovered. But I think exactly like you said, we're all have a nobodiness. But some of these nobodies just get to be part of, like, the greatest works that we've produced.

[00:47:21] And others get to be like Herman, who are just these, like, German little academic scholars getting mad about some insert in a, you know, 1892 version of, like, the first folio or something. Like, you know, that's part of the ocean, too. It's just not, like, an interesting part of it, you know? Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's a part that I like, the part of the Shakespeare's memory story that relates to the everything and nothing.

[00:47:50] And it's when he's talking about the goal that he had to write a biography of Shakespeare. And then he says, I was naive enough to have contemplated a biography just as Thorpe had. I soon discovered, however, that that literary genre requires a talent for writing that I do not possess. So I do not know how to tell a story. I do not know how to tell my own story, which is a great deal more extraordinary than Shakespeare's, which is an interesting thing to say I want to ask you about. He says, besides such a book would be pointless.

[00:48:16] Chance or fate dealt Shakespeare those trivial, terrible things that all men know. It was his gift to be able to transmute them into fables, into characters that were much more alive than the gray man who dreamed them. Yeah. Into verses which will never be abandoned into verbal music. And it's that gray man who dreamed them that is just like in that sentence is the everything and nothing. Yeah. Have you ever heard spies talking about the gray man?

[00:48:42] The goal, if you're trying to disguise yourself when you're a spy, is to be a completely uninteresting person. Like every detail about you be boring and mundane. And they call this the gray man. Yeah. That's your goal. It's not to like put on like crazy wigs or anything. It's you want to be somebody that's like so boring that nobody notices. Yeah.

[00:49:06] And I don't think the point is that Shakespeare was like especially drab and gray and boring compared to normal people. Like I think it's more like an Amadeus thing where it's like Shakespeare was a guy like everybody else. In other words, we're all kind of gray man. But he translates it into verbal music. Yeah. And then this line, which follows what you just read.

[00:49:32] What purpose would it serve to unravel that wondrous fabric, besiege and mine the tower, reduce to the modest proportions of a documentary biography or a realistic novel, the sound and fury of Macbeth? Yeah. Good job, Herman. That's a good sentence there. That's the best thing you've ever written. Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally agree with you. I mean, the mistake is to think that Shakespeare would be different. Right. You can read it.

[00:50:00] And I think maybe on first reading, I might have thought this was just about Shakespeare being like actually different than everybody. But the point is, he's the same. And when you talk about sort of like what you've learned through the practice of meditation about the self and Borges seems sympathetic to it. Yeah. Like, I don't know what he actually believed.

[00:50:20] But what I do know, at least I think I know, is that the metaphysics of identity were distressing enough to him for him to seriously doubt what that we are a thing. Yeah. Right? Like, there's nothing. You cannot read all of these stories and think that Borges ever felt that there is like this secure sense of who he is or who anybody is. Yeah. So many of his stories are obsessed with that. Yeah.

[00:50:47] Like, think of the circular ruins or the immortal. Like, they're all about the like vague, blurry boundaries of what a self is. Yeah. And I think like that you can connect these two themes. Like, maybe the mistake of thinking, like, if you're a scholar, that learning about the man is going to give you insight into the art is because you think, oh, my God, he must have had this gigantic soul.

[00:51:16] It must be extraordinary to be Shakespeare. And the truth is, no, it's not extraordinary. It's pretty much like being like other people except for this one gift. Actually, your actor thing is a really good, I think, analogy because, you know, when you see interviews with actors and some of them are very cool and very smart and others just seem like normal kind of ditzy people. But when they're doing their art, it's a completely different thing.

[00:51:46] And I guess my point is maybe the reason we keep making the mistake of thinking that we can learn about the art from studying the life of the artist is because we are in the thrall of some kind of self illusion there. Yeah. And we're mistaken. We're just mistaken about what it is that's going on, either metaphysically or actually psychologically or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. This is just insight to me into memories.

[00:52:15] Like the fact that there are two competing memories in his head, two like sets of memories, and that one of them is of this like famous Shakespeare author is just conceit to talk about the fact that like memories in general, they were just wrong about what they what they are and whether they constitute us truly. Yeah. I don't know. At the end of reading this, it gave me like Borges often does just like a metaphysical shakiness. Like, yeah, about who what makes me me.

[00:52:45] Yeah, you're always on you get a little vertigo that like, I think a lot of his characters get. Yeah. When he talks about Daniel Thorpe, and he says, he gave off an almost physical air of melancholy. That's like such a great description of a lot of Borges's characters and also how I imagine Borges the man in some ways. Yeah. There's a deep doubt in his work that he infuses into his characters.

[00:53:13] Back to the theme of how Shakespeare created art. I love this description. He says, one morning, I perceived a sense of guilt deep within his memory. I did not try to define it. Shakespeare himself has done so for all time. He goes on to say, suffice it to say that the offense had nothing in common with perversion. So maybe we could learn about the fact of the matter, about what event caused Shakespeare to feel some guilt. That led to like him writing Julius Caesar or something. Yeah.

[00:53:43] But him writing Julius Caesar is really the way to understand his guilt. Right? Yeah. It's not that like we would be disappointed if it was like, oh yeah, one day he insulted his mother or something. Exactly. Like that line that I read earlier, what purpose would it serve to unravel that wondrous fabric, besiege and mine the tower, reduce to the modest proportions of a documentary, biography or a realistic novel, the sound and fury of Macbeth. I think that's exactly the point.

[00:54:10] It's almost insulting and damaging to try to reduce the art to that. It can't be reduced to that. It's going to make it more banal. The art is the best way of understanding like whatever is transcendent about those feelings. That's right. It's the part that we're interested in understanding. It's like the part that we crave, that we earn from the artist.

[00:54:31] I love, by the way, the anecdote that you told about your memory because it gets to another feature of memory that both Herman, the narrator, and Daniel Thorpe are talking about when they're talking about the mingling of those memories. Where he says at first they were separate and then they just started to mingle. And it's impossible for that not to happen. And he does say at some point that long and studious solitude prepared him for the docile reception of the miracle.

[00:54:59] And I took that to be that, okay, if you sort of pause living your own life for a while and you're not creating and generating new memories, then you're sort of giving room for those other memories to come in. Yeah. But then once he's living his life as Herman and these Shakespeare memories are coming in, they're just intermingling in a way that I think is just sort of a nice way of discussing what happened with you and Liza, which is your memories mingle with other people. Yep. Like memories are a living, it's a living document.

[00:55:29] It's the palimpsest that's getting written over and sometimes it gets written over by other people. And usually this doesn't toss us into some sort of like identity crisis because we don't notice it. We just don't notice it. But in this fictional case where you really are given magically the memories of somebody else to live in your mind. Yes, absolutely. Like our memories are this commingling with other people.

[00:55:54] And there's a lot of memories that I have that are kind of based on other people telling me those stories. And so now I have them in my head. Like I wouldn't have remembered them on my own. And I think that applies to what he thinks about art, which is it isn't the product of one person. It's the product of a whole culture and tradition. So like remember when we talked about Borges and I and on the thing I put in Slack, they include that with everything and nothing.

[00:56:22] So in Borges and I, which is him trying to separate himself from the artist, it's actually quite relevant. Yeah. But there's this one line I wanted to read. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved, he, Borges, has achieved some valid pages. But those pages cannot save me. Perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even him. But rather to the language and tradition.

[00:56:46] So I think that that's such a running theme in his work too is that we attribute like the authorship of works to a specific person because that's just our concept. That's our tradition. But, you know, that person plays a big part in it but not the only part.

[00:57:07] And there's a whole tradition that leads to that person being able to transmute what they get into these new great works of art. And maybe it's a fool's errand to try to make clean distinctions between the artist and his role or her role versus all the other things that led to that work of art being produced. Which is ultimately the important thing. No, absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:57:33] So I don't know where to go from here but I did want to talk about some of the things that he says that did kind of give him insight because they are a little mundane. He says, I love that. Yeah.

[00:58:02] So it's better in the Spanish because he uses the English word moon for the first time at the end of that sentence, you know? Yeah. I noted another discovery. Shakespeare's apparent instances of inadvertence, those absences dans l'infini, of which Hugo apologetically speaks, were deliberate. Shakespeare tolerated them or actually interpolated them so that his discourse destined for the stage might appear to be spontaneous and not overly polished or artificial. That same goal inspired him to mix his metaphors. Right.

[00:58:28] Which is a product of him having been an actor and so knowing what comes off as a good performance, you know? Right. So there is something there. But as I was reading it, I was like, are these instances of Thorpe warning him not to manufacture memories? Like how much of this could have been just a case of him throwing himself into Shakespeare's work and in Chaucer and whatever and this just actually being his own insight? Like there's a reading of this story that were very plausibly nothing actually happened.

[00:58:58] Right. Right. You know? So this guy Herman says, oh, you know, if I really want to stimulate these memories, I should read all of the things that we know Shakespeare must have read because he was alluding to them. So he starts reading that list of old English authors that I don't know, but Chaucer among them. Oh, and then all of a sudden he's like reciting a Chaucer poem. Right. And then he has this insight that you say that he wrote about, about Sonnet 127, but actually turns out that a few years before somebody had also written that.

[00:59:26] So it could very well be that this was just a person getting true insight into Shakespeare by throwing themselves into the works that influenced him and into his own works. Right. You could read this as a delusion of someone who is so into the scholarship and the life of this person that they start to actually like the distinction between them and the person they're studying becomes blurred.

[00:59:51] Yeah, I think that's interesting. When he has that insight about why Shakespeare used mixed metaphors, even if that memory really did translate through this magic process from Thorpe, he still has no way of being sure whether what you're saying is right or whether that's a legitimate Shakespeare memory. How would he know that?

[01:00:14] Totally. As with his memory of, you know, he might think he's remembering Anne Hathaway, but he had a very similar experience himself. So he's sort of transporting it. And yeah, now that I think about it, what might have happened? This is like, I think, a plausible interpretation of the story is here is a scholar at a Shakespeare conference doing the kind of scholarship that you were describing at the beginning, which is like, oh, let's do some exegesis of Shakespeare. Let's read some facts. Let's talk about like where he was at this time in his life.

[01:00:43] Like the traditions of the work and what can be truly attributed to him. Yeah. Yeah. And then because of this moment where somebody says they're going to offer him the memory of Shakespeare, he starts to consume the art in a completely different way. And it comes alive for him in a way that it had never come alive because he just hadn't been consuming the art in that way.

[01:01:07] Like reading other works of art that might have had an influence on Shakespeare, really throwing himself into not like which edition and not like a tirade against the note that was put into the 1787 edition, but just really, really experiencing the art. Yeah. So if you wanted to carry that interpretation further, though, you would have to kind of explain what happens at the end.

[01:01:32] You have to think that maybe that made him just really lose his bearings and become unmoored when he sees great shapes forged in iron, wood and glass and doesn't realize that it's a railway station. Yeah. So at that point, like maybe on your interpretation, he just starts to lose his grip. To lose it a little bit. Yeah. I mean, he does say, I think maybe even more seriously is he says that he started to forget his own language.

[01:02:02] Yeah. Right. You know? Yes. And, but again, that can happen like that. You know, I've known people who grew up speaking a language and then spend enough time in another country that they start forgetting words. Absolutely. In their own language that they grew up with. I forget English words, you know? Right. It would be kind of a funny, not funny. Like, I think it would be a meaningful to me an interpretation of the story that that's what's going on. But again, Thorpe was like, I'm going to fuck with this Shakespeare scholar.

[01:02:31] Or someone fuck with him. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And like then at the very end, some guy on the end of the other side of the phone is like. Sure. Whatever. He's probably like drunk. He's shit faced. He's like, yeah, I'll take it. Yeah. But I think even if you don't go that far, like maybe he like the thing about Ben, remembering Ben Johnson drilling him about like Latin and Greek verses or whatever. Like maybe that did happen.

[01:02:57] But when he comes to these more subtle recognitions, it really wouldn't be even from his perspective possible to know whether that's a really real Shakespeare memory or all the stuff that I'm importing to that. Totally. And so it would destabilize you completely. Yeah. And I'm not partial to what level of magic occurred. Yeah. Because I think it's just, it's interesting.

[01:03:20] I think, I think had Borges wanted us to be certain about it, he would have given us examples that were indisputable realizations that he had, you know, because, because his teacher making him recite Latin and Greek is not, it's not something that you couldn't figure out. Right. Right. So if Borges had, I think, wanted to drive home like a preferred interpretation, he would have actually said like, oh yeah, he discovered this thing that nobody knew about him.

[01:03:48] But I think, but I think like that would be very hard to do actually. Like he had some pretty specific memories and like, you can always think, well, that's just, I mean, I think that could be part of the point is that it would be really hard to know whether you were just imagining. Maybe this is like the distinction between imagination and memory is also blurrier than we think. Yeah.

[01:04:11] I guess what I was thinking would make for a lesser story, but potentially another Borges story where, for instance, he remembers that Shakespeare hid a manuscript in like the crypt of a building of a church. Right. And he goes, and in fact, it is there. Yeah. And there you could prove that that was in fact Shakespeare's memory. But I don't think that's what Borges is going for here. Borges is going for us to think about what it means to possess memories and what it does to your identity.

[01:04:36] And so in true Borges fashion, he's maybe leaving us a way to interpret this. Yeah. Yeah. So then just like another question for your interpretation and also for my conviction that this is a meditation on, if not the illusoriness of the self, the fluidity at the very least of the self.

[01:05:00] But then at the end, when he decides I can't do this anymore, he says, quoting Spinoza, he says, the wish of all things, Spinoza says, is to continue to be what they are. The stone wishes to be a stone. This tiger, tiger. And I wanted it to be Herman Sorgel again. And this is when he decides to call people. I love that. Yeah. He just goes through the phone book and finds. Randomly dialing. And if it's a woman or a kid, he's like, no, I'm not going to burden them.

[01:05:30] He's going to respect their vulnerable estates. But like, what does that even mean in this context to be Herman Sorgel again? You know? Well, this is what I was going to say. So this is because, yeah, I think you're hitting on something super important about this story, because at the end, it doesn't sound like he's back to normal. Right. He's still sort of like he has a PS. I am now a man among men. In my waking hours, I'm Professor Emeritus Herman Sorgel.

[01:05:57] I putter about the card catalog and compose erudite trivialities. But at dawn, I sometimes know that the person dreaming is that other man. Every so often in the evening, I'm unsettled by small fleeting memories that are perhaps authentic. This is what got really interesting for me, because even if so, like, let's take the magical memories, literally, and he gives them up. Herman Sorgel has memories of having had Shakespeare's memories. Right.

[01:06:23] So there is no precise, like, surgical removal of those memories anymore. They have, like, forever become part of him. You're going to remember that you used to remember the face of his neighbor. We should call this episode The Reintegrators. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, exactly. Like, and that thing that are perhaps authentic. There is absolutely no way for him to know the authenticity of it.

[01:06:52] I also love the last line, right? So he says, as he's trying to get rid of the memories, he felt the guest Shakespeare's memory would never leave him. And so he had to, like a palimpsest, right? Like, he had to try to erase it by going to other works. And so he studied William Blake. He gives a little dig on William Blake. Yeah. The rebellious disciples. I found it to be less complex than merely complicated. That is a little. Why would William Blake catch a stray hearing? I know.

[01:07:21] And then he says, all of that leads him to Shakespeare. He hit it last upon the only solution that gave hope courage. Strict, vast music. Bach. Which is funny because he's German, but also Bach is kind of a perfectly abstract. It's not meaning anything. It's not. It's just the music. Yeah. It's math on a harpsichord is what I like to call Bach. Yeah. That's like the most non-personal thing. Just to get Shakespeare out of his head.

[01:07:51] That's great. And I do love that everything led him to Shakespeare nonetheless. Because it just says something about one, like you're a Shakespeare scholar. So like all of the connections that you're going to make, like you're going to somehow bring you back to Shakespeare. But also, as he sort of mentioned, Shakespeare is hugely important in culture. So it's going to be hard to escape it. And then finally, if Shakespeare is the great artist that he truly believes him to be,

[01:08:16] how can you avoid having like most themes not being somehow mirrored, foreshadowed in something that Shakespeare wrote? So good luck, Herman, trying to rid yourself. It's like me trying to rid myself of Borges. Yeah. Thankfully, we don't have to. We don't have to. I do call people sometimes randomly and ask them if they want Borges' memories. Just to see what they'll say.

[01:08:44] Over, under, how many people would you have to call before? Before a serious man said yes. Yeah. Would you say yes? I probably wouldn't. I would get a little freaked out about it. I would say yes. You would? Yeah. You would like go through the whole ritual of it too? I'd be like, I accept Borges' memories. Yeah. But yeah, because that's probably because I don't believe enough, but like I want to believe.

[01:09:10] So like the risk of being shown that something like that could happen is worth it for me. Going back to like this idea of I wanted to be Herman Sorgel again, I guess the idea is that he can't at this point. But it does imply that at least the narrator believes that there is something that it means to be Herman Sorgel without Shakespeare. And I think maybe that's just his stubbornness.

[01:09:37] He's holding on to something because I think if we truly take this as a metaphor for what happens to us, like I might want to be not physically, but like I might want to be 25 year old David. Like I want. Right. And that's just, that can't happen. You know, maybe I'm stuck in, in like, I'm a 35 year old David and I want to be there. That will never be available to me. And if I insist that that is truly who I am, then I'm just like being extra stubborn about the illusion that you refer to. Right.

[01:10:06] And that's what I read there where he's like, what is it even that, that you want to be? What does it mean to be that person anymore? Yeah. The whole story has like deconstructed that whole idea of what that means. And so, and that's why he has to go into Bach, which is a little like everything and nothing, like going to God and being like, we're all just in a whirlwind dreamed. Yeah. And I like in everything and nothing, like going to be like a mundane businessman who writes

[01:10:33] a will that doesn't even refer to any literature. That's sort of like his, his version of going to Bach. Yeah. Yeah. He's losing himself in numbers, I guess. Yeah. And such a good, like having just read and taught Hamlet, which is also a deconstruction in some ways of the idea of a stable identity. Like it's really like a perfectly layered story in that way, like thematically. In everything and nothing at that end part where he says within a week, he had returned

[01:11:03] to his birthplace where he recovered the trees and the river of his childhood and did not associate them with those others fabled with mythological illusions and Latin words that his muse had celebrated. His home just did not have the associations with all of the other stuff that he'd written. It was just his home. And then he says he had to be somebody. He became a retired businessman who'd made a fortune and had an interest in loans, lawsuits and petty usury. It was in that role that he dictated the arid last will and testament that we know today

[01:11:29] from which he deliberately banished every trace of sentiment or literature. Yeah. Well, that's like, it's like Herman himself, right? It's the same arc. It's like he wants to be Herman again. He doesn't want to have to look at a tree and think, oh, that could be part of this myth where I'm like, like he just wants it to be a tree. Yeah. And he wants to worry about things that normal people worry about. Yeah. So what do you make then of the end of Everything and Nothing? About the God? Yeah.

[01:11:58] Where he's basically like saying, you're not, like you were nothing and I am nothing. And so. Well, we talked about this, right? Like, I think this is all one big ocean that we play a part of, but it's all fluid. Yeah. It all slips through your fingers. The moment you try to pin down what an identity, what a person is, it just slips right through your fingers. We're all dreams of God, metaphorically speaking, that sometimes produce these just like incredible

[01:12:28] masterpieces that people will be worshiping and learning from and enriching their lives with for, you know, centuries. Yeah. Yeah. And this central metaphor of the dreamer and the dreamed is throughout Borges, but he also has other things like mirrors and doubles. Yeah. And it's all just pointing to the same thing. And I think Lynch is the same way also. Like they're very similar in this respect. Like. Yeah.

[01:12:56] It's all just part of this unfolding. And everything is a little bit of a delusion, a dream, an intermingling of memories and experience. In Everything and Nothing, there's this great line. Richard says that inside himself, he plays the part of many. And Iago says with curious words, I am not what I am. The fundamental identity of living, dreaming and performing inspired him to famous passages.

[01:13:24] And I think that's like Shakespeare was telling you over and over again, I am not like an essential like self. I am not what I am. Yeah. So good. So good. All right. Any final thoughts? I don't think so. I have post Borges, whatever you call it. Melancholy. Yeah. Post Borges, melancholy. All right.

[01:13:53] Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards. I want you to take over the job. I know. Bye. I'm waiting.