In 1966, Jorge Luis Borges approached the University of Buenos Aires to teach a course in English literature. There were 25 master classes in which Borges spoke about the British ancestors, mentioning battles and ancient funerary rites, without forgetting the influence of the Nordic sagas.
With a precise speech and without losing juice, Borges introduces references and historical data before reaching the eighteenth century with what he considers one of the best biographies that have been written to date, being considered a model of the biographical genre: The life of Dr. Samuel Johnson seen by James Boswell. With this thoroughness, Borges follows the timeline until he catches up with Robert Louis Stevenson and his doctor Jekyll for the last class.
The aforementioned course was published in its entirety by the Lumen publishing house, and in its pages we find the most didactic Borges and also the most scientific Borges. We could assume that it is a book that Borges never thought of as a book, but that does not prevent it from becoming his most scientific book. Borges himself said somewhere that literary genres depend on the way they are read and in Borges’s classes we can find scientific details, because in his words there is a kind of magic that does not reside in said words, but in what that those same words insinuate, in what they do not show, but that allows us to intuit what each one of them hides.
Serve as an example when Borges introduces us to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) with his famous poem entitled The Ancient Mariner’s Ballad, where he tells us the story of an old sailor who behaves as a spectator of his actions rather than as an actor in his own life. In one of the passages, the old sailor kills an albatross that until then had been a friend of the crew, and he does it without knowing why, that is, he commits the crime driven by an impulse whose effect has been the very cause of the. His action has been determined by his own action, which is something that just happens, in such a way that nothing and no one is responsible.
We are in the macrocosm, but Coleridge presents us in his poem with an action that just happens, as if it were an illusion that can only be allowed in the microcosm, in the world of invisible particles, where causality dissipates. Quantum physics and its aspects have been raised to a macroscopic dimension by Coleridge. Borges points it out through the silences he leaves between words.
“Men of science” or scientists
To continue with the English poet, it is worth remembering here that at the end of his life he hardly left home. When he did, it was to attend meetings where scientific issues were discussed. Coleridge, as a poet that he was, was also a generator of language and was obsessed with finding a word that would define all those people who dedicate themselves to coming into contact with nature and experiment with it until they achieve material results, that is, the The author was after a word that would name people dedicated to scientific research.
The denomination “men of science” was correct, but it limited the way to women. For this reason, in one of those meetings that Coleridge attended, William Whewell, a man of science, suggested the use of the word scientist, giving with it a professional dimension to all those people who were dedicated to scientific work. But the word did not catch on. It would take time for it to be accepted into the official English vocabulary.
However, in our letters, in the fifteenth century, the poet Juan de Mena already used it. in his book Labyrinth of Fortune, published in 1444, uses the term to refer to the venerable Mr. Yñigo López. With this, we return to Borges, to that story titled The night of the giftsand with him we moved to the old Confitería del Águila, in Florida, at the height of Piedad, where the problem of knowledge was debated and someone invoked the Platonic thesis that we have already seen everything in a previous world, and that knowing is to recognize, and that learning is nothing other than remembering and that ignoring is, in fact, having forgotten.
For now, it would take around five hundred years and two world wars for the term “scientist” to be recognized by the British and, with it, officially throughout the world. Let’s not ignore it.
the stone ax is a section where Montero Glezwith the will of prose, exerts his particular siege on scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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