Google昨天又有一个新doodle，是纪念阿根廷大文豪博尔赫斯（Jorge Luis Borges, 1899-1986）的，诞辰112周年。

这个图很后现代，一个老人站在“一堆”不同的建筑物中——它的意思是博尔赫斯的一句话：“不同的建筑风格令人想起不同语言的区域”。

    我接触老博很“迟钝”，他的作品流行的时候，我一眼都没看过（现在书店里难得见他的书了）；偶然见过他的《巴别的图书馆》（The Library of Babel），便感觉有趣，应该喜欢——小说最后说

The Library is limitless and periodic. If an eternal voyager were to traverse it in any direction, he would find, after many centuries, that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder (which, repeated, would constitute an order: Order itself). My solitude rejoices in this elegant hope.

这是多么神奇的想象啊！

法兰西学院的Andre Maurois有段评论老博作品的文字，说得真令人神往：

Jorge Luis Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives. Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention, and their tight, almost mathematical, style. Argentine by birth and temperament, but nurtured on universal literature, Borges has no spiritual homeland. He creates, outside time and space, imaginary and symbolic worlds. It is a sign of his importance that, in placing him, only strange and perfect works can be called to mind. He is akin to Kafka, Poe, sometimes to Henry James and Wells, always to Valéry by the abrupt projection of his paradoxes in what has been called his “private metaphysics.”

我就喜欢具有这种特质的作家——本没有精神家园，而用作品为自己造一个想象的、符号的世界。有个例子很说明这种“特质”：老博喜欢Wells（写《时间机器》那位），却不喜欢凡尔纳，更不能容忍王尔德称Wells为“科学的凡尔纳”。在他看来，凡尔纳不过猜想了未来能实现的东西，而Wells幻想了纯粹的可能甚至不可能。（难怪我从来不看凡尔纳，原来是因为这个！）

借老博自己的话说，他的风格和玄学家们一样：“They seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment. They think metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy.”

【至于老博与建筑，以前有篇博文，原题“功能主义的创新”，提到过他的“新建筑运动”，贴出来时改了题目：http://blog.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=279992&do=blog&id=376803 】