The Genius of Borges
"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books -- setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.... A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books." Jorge Luis Borges , The Garden of Forking Paths (Foreword)