Journey Without an End

A PERSONAL ANTHOLOGY by Jorge Luis Borges. 210 pages. Grove Press. $5.

Argentina has no national literature, but it has produced a literary mind that is as mysterious and elusive as the fretted shadows on the moonlit grass. He is Jorge Luis Borges, 67, who has been hailed in his own country as the greatest living writer in Spanish, though only a few of his books (Ficciones, Dreamti-gers) have been translated into English. All told, his international reputation rests on three slim volumes. These new selections are a collage of fables, parables, essays and poems--the ones he chooses to be judged by.

Borges does not perceive the world as other men do. An eye illness made him blind ten years ago; moreover, his "stories" are not fiction but something more akin to thought patterns. Long ago, he began storing his visions in what he calls the "unstable world of the mind, an indefatigable labyrinth, a chaos, a dream." And out of this darkness, from total recall, flash his scintillas of light.

A Lost Face. Borges calls them footnotes to unwritten books. "Mankind has lost a face," he writes in one, barely a page long. "We lost these features in the same way as an image in a kaleidoscope is lost forever. We may see them, and not know it. The profile of a Jew in the subway may be that of Christ; the hands which give us some coins at a change window may recall those which some soldiers once nailed to the Cross."

In a fable, Borges imagines Droc-tulft, a barbarian, fighting against the Romans at the siege of Ravenna. When Droctulft's eyes fix on the city he is helping to storm, he sees for the first time "a whole that is complex and yet without disorder. He knows that in the city he will be a dog or a child, and that he will not even begin to understand it, but that it is worth more than his god and his sworn faith and the German marshes." Droctulft deserts and dies fighting for dying Rome. "He was not a traitor," writes Borges. "He was a visionary."

Life's Circularity. It requires a patient reader to keep from feeling that he has been marching through Borges in circles. But, like all compelling writers, Borges makes the march profoundly worthwhile; the traveler may find himself unconsciously adapting to the author's concentric step.

This leads, in The Circular Ruins, to "a temple, devoured by an ancient conflagration, profaned by the malarial jungle, its god unhonored now of man." A stranger arrives, impelled there by the desire "to dream a man. He wanted to dream him in minute totality and then impose him on reality." The stranger succeeds, only to be assailed by the fear that his creation will discover its source:

"Not to be a man, to be the projection of another man's dream--what incom parable humiliation!" A fire blooms in the forest, and the stranger, calmly accepting death, walks into the flames. But they do not burn: "With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he, too, was all appearance, that someone else was dreaming him."

Borges may be saying that to search for meaning is to set forth on a journey that never ends--the ruined temple is life's circularity; the dreamer himself is a dream. He may also be saying that, along the way, it is less important to know than to feel. And that may be the key to Borges, who casts over the reader a powerful, almost irresistible spell.

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