Jorge Luis Borges authored a short piece which appeared in his 1960 collection The Maker (or Dreamtigers), titled “Borges and I”. It is perhaps a philosophical story, or an essay, or to reference a genre he evinced particular fondness for, a parable. I produced and released one of my Speculative Fiction Studies video specifically focused on it earlier this week. I’ve been mulling it over since, and thought I might set down some of my own thoughts and situation, not quite in parallel to Borges’ own, but along lines that perhaps do in some measure converge.
Before that, though, since it is such a short selection of his writing, it may be useful to review what it is Borges himself (or is it indeed the other Borges) wrote. Here it is, in the version translated by James E. Irby.
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.
What I want to do here is less analysis of this complex phenomenon or relationship Borges himself is narrating for us, and more reflecting upon something I’ve long thought about which bears some analogy to the situation he sketches.
I have written quite a bit over the course of my life, possibly close to or more than Borges had at that point. He would have been around 60 years old, and I am just five years younger. I’ve written one book, many dozens of articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, book reviews, and hundreds of blog posts. Despite what my output possesses in volume, it likely does not rival Borges in profundity, and quite likely the brevity of his works plays to his advantage in the comparison.
But the analogy I wish to draw does not depend in my case on writing. He tells us of the “other Borges” who composes and presumably engages in some of the deep thinking that produces Borges’ literature. If there is an “other Sadler” I do not imagine it would be a creature or reflection emerging from writing. So perhaps I’m safer here than Borges would have felt himself. No, it would be the other Sadler who exists as a moving image, in most cases dressed better, more focused and intellectual, than the person I am, the Sadler you (and I as well) see discussing works, authors, and topics from philosophy, literature, religions, political theory, and occasionally other disciplines.
The “other Sadler” would be the one you watch and listen to when you call up my YouTube videos. In some respects, he has a shorter life-span than I. How could he not, since I only began uploading recordings of myself, which I (or rather a video camera) took, which I (or rather computer software) edited and produced, and which I (or the website YouTube and my own computers) uploaded, I only began that not-continual, but often-iterated process sixteen years ago. So the other Sadler, by one measure, is merely an adolescent by comparison to me, younger than both of my now-adult children.
And yet, over the years, as I’ve gone into the “analytics”, the metrics and guestimates YouTube provides its euphemistically termed “creators”, there’s another measure that I’m occasionally examined and then extrapolated from. It started as total minutes watched, that is, an estimate of how much time, spread across myriad screens, people have spent watching my videos, which are, with just a few exceptions, recordings of me speaking to the camera. At some point, YouTube stopped providing that information with the metric of minutes and just started telling me the number of hours. At this late date, they provide this for me estimated to the nearest 100,000 hours.
Years back, as I’d divide the total number of minutes by 60, to get the number of hours, and then by 24, to get the total number of days, and then by 365, to get the total number of years, those figures crossed a threshold. Whatever age I was at the time, somewhere in my 40s, that “other Sadler”, the one existing out there on YouTube, had more total years of viewing time than I had lived years. Of course, does he actually live? And can you accumulate all those seconds, minutes, hours, days, watched by people all over the globe (some of whom are doubtless no longer living) as time for that video avatar to have “lived”? That remains a question to work out, which means to think about and explore, perhaps even advance arguments bearing upon.
I’ll set aside those questions for the moment. Perhaps I’ll consider them in a later post here. The current measure of hours viewed for videos in my channel is a crudely estimated 2.4 million. That works out nicely for determining total days the other Sadler has been watched, has in some sense lived, given there’s 24 hours in practically every day. So one hundred thousand days. How many years does that come to? Just under 274. A much vaster number than I can hope to live in consecutive time. And that’s just at this point. What will the number be in another 15 years from now? Double that? Some quantity exponentially greater? I have no idea.
The relation between myself and that “other Sadler” is in some respects similar to that which Borges tells us holds between himself and the “other Borges”, but with even less of the hostility which he claims does not mark their relationship. I too, at least in some portions of my life, am gradually giving over, if not everything, at least quite a bit to him. I too exist, at last in part, so that he can contrive his video equivalents of literature. Does he share my preferences, but with a tinge of vanity and hypocrisy? I don’t think that is the case, but I can say that he approaches the matters I too think about in ways I might myself not do outside of the recording frame. So the parallels are not exact.
There is some consolation at this point, given the difference of medium. Unlike Borges, I can be confident on one matter. I am the Sadler writing this. If I were speaking to the camera, then perhaps I could raise similar doubts. So long as I only write about this, and resist a temptation to speak to a much vaster audience, these reflections remain my own.
Gregory Sadler is the founder of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.