Picking up where I left off yesterday, here’s Borges in the essay, “The Thousand and One Nights:”

The Thousand and One Nights is not something which has died. It is a book so vast that it is not necessary to have read it, for it is a part of memory–and also, now, a part of tonight.

Earlier in the essay, Borges recounts De Quincey’s retelling of the Aladdin story in De Quincey’s memoir. Borges credits De Quincey’s “wonderfully inventive memory” with the fact that his retelling of the Aladdin story contains a crucial detail that does not appear in the original: “the fact of Aladdin putting his ear to the ground and deciphering the footsteps of Aladdin.” The Thousand and One Nights possesses this peculiar quality of vastness because it is not the work of one writer, but of many: “It is the work of thousands of authors, and none of them knew that he was helping to construct this illustrious book, one of the most illustrious books in all literature.” Which brings us, as they say, to the modern reader/writer. Because The Thousand and One Nights is a collaborative work on a massive scale, it belongs to all of us–not only to our memory, but to our imagination. Because no single author can lay claim to its creation, a De Quincey, a Borges, a Calvino…any one of us, in fact…may add our voice to the cumulative narrative of The Nights: “To erect the palace of The Thousand and One Nights it took generations of men, and these men are our benefactors, as we have inherited this inexhaustible book, this book capable of so much metamorphosis.”

The exercise: Get thee to the palace! Take any one of the tales of The Thousand and One Nights and add to it the stuff of your own imagination.