Episode Details

In 1955 Jorge Luis Borges was named director of Argentina's National Library, custodian of nearly a million books, at the exact moment his hereditary blindness left him able to see only vague shapes and the color yellow. This episode traces the Argentine visionary from his 1899 birth in Buenos Aires, caught between a maternal line of military heroes and a father's English library, through bilingual childhood brilliance, wartime exile in Geneva, the Ultraist movement in Spain, and pasting surreal poems on the brick walls of Buenos Aires.

We follow the 1938 head injury and near-fatal sepsis that reset his writing, the 1941 stories of infinite libraries and branching time that anticipated hypertext and the multiverse, his clashes with Peron that got him promoted to inspector of poultry and rabbits, and the political misjudgments of the 1970s, including accepting an award from Pinochet, that are widely believed to have cost him the Nobel Prize. The episode also covers his mother's role as secretary into her nineties, the 1961 Formentor Prize shared with Samuel Beckett, his deathbed request for both a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister, and his legacy as the bridge between modernism and postmodernism.

• The two conflicting family instruction manuals, cavalry charges versus quiet reading, and the shame Borges carried as a bookish thinker
• Why he spent years buying up and destroying copies of his own early Ultraist work
• The municipal library basement where he finished a day's cataloging in an hour and wrote for the rest of the shift
• How total blindness shifted him toward poetry and short fables composed and polished entirely in his head
• Why a philosopher of subjective, infinite reality is an inherent enemy of any regime demanding a single narrative