I’m currently reading Jorge Luis Borges’s Seven Nights, a series of lectures Borges delivered at the Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires in 1977. The subjects range from The Divine Comedy to Buddhism to blindness. Borges himself was afflicted by blindness, and in his introduction to this slim volume, Alstair Reid explains that it was his blindness, in part, that made Borges’s lectures so compelling and unforgettable. Because he could not read in front of an audience, he memorized his lectures, which meander from the personal to the political, from great books to memorable moments of his childhood, peppered always with apt literary quotations which were kept in an elaborate mental filing system, a system even more labyrinthine than his books. “Something may give him a reason to quote Oscar Wilde, and he will go on to talk about Wilde, about the French language, his schooldays in Geneva, Calvin, theScots, always turning to the library in his memory. Everything connects…The lectures in this book all reveal these connected shifts in Borges’ attention, the flow of his mind and memory.”

The lecture here entitled “Nightmares” is one of my favorite, as it traces the etymology of the word nightmare and its counterparts in several languages, settling finally upon the English word and Shakespeare’s use of it: “the night mare and her nine foals.”

“There is another interpretation that may help us, one that relates nightmare to the German word Marchen. Marchen means fable, fairy tale, fiction. Nightmare, then, would be the fiction of the night.”

Borges then goes on to describe the two nightmares he has suffered from his entire life. In one, he is trapped in a labyrinth. In another, he is trapped in a house of mirrors. Very Borgesian, no?

Every now and then I come upon a book that, as a teacher, I find wildly inspiring. A book I’d like to build an entire course around, because its possibilities for exploration are vast. This is one such book.