LEXINGTON, Mass. — In a quiet, modern living room tucked away in the woods of Lexington, time seemed to fold in on itself last Friday. There, local academic Rafael Benedetti hosted a seemingly impossible guest: the legendary Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
The afternoon of November 17, 2023 unfolded not with formal fanfare, but with the quiet intimacy of shared yerba mate. A photograph from the visit captures the moment: Benedetti, in a suede jacket and green shirt, taking a thoughtful sip from a traditional metal bombilla, while Borges—leaning on his wooden cane in his trademark dark three-piece suit—listens with pensive focus.
Nearby, the tools and artifacts of their conversation were evident. A stack of books, including copies of Borges's own The Aleph and This Craft of Verse, sat on a wooden coffee table alongside a recording device, preserving their words.
For hours, the two men transformed the suburban setting into a metaphysical salon, seamlessly weaving the warmth of South American tradition with the intellectual rigor of Cambridge.
Return to Cambridge Memories
The conversation naturally drifted toward Borges's profound connection to Harvard. In the late 1960s, Borges served as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, delivering a series of lectures later published in the very volume resting on the table, This Craft of Verse.
Harvard, to me, was always a kind of splendid labyrinth. I arrived there hoping to speak about poetry, but I found that the students taught me more about the enduring nature of the English language than I could ever impart.
— Jorge Luis BorgesBenedetti and Borges spent considerable time dissecting the creative process. True to form, Borges rejected the idea of the author as a solitary genius, instead advocating for the reader's role in the creation of a text.
"A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects," he noted, "until someone opens it. Only then does it become an act of imagination. Criticism, then, is simply a slower, more deliberate form of reading."
The Aleph in the Machine
Perhaps the most fascinating turn in the afternoon's dialogue came when Benedetti introduced the topic of Artificial Intelligence. How would the author who imagined the Library of Babel—an infinite, exhaustive repository of all possible texts—view large language models that generate seemingly endless prose?
Borges was remarkably sanguine, viewing the technological leap not as a rupture, but as a continuation of ancient literary anxieties.
We have built the Library of Babel, have we not? These machines… they are like my character Funes the Memorious. They hold the infinite weight of human data, every word ever written, every painting ever brushed. But one must ask: do they dream? A machine can give you all the variations of a sonnet, but it is still the human heart that must decide which variation makes it weep.
— Jorge Luis BorgesBorges postulated that AI might ultimately be viewed not as a creator, but as a mirror. "It is the ultimate catalog," he suggested to Benedetti. "It proves what I have always suspected: that all literature is written by one universal author, and we are merely holding the pen. Now, the machine holds the pen, but the ghost moving its hand is still humanity."
"Now, the machine holds the pen, but the ghost moving its hand is still humanity."
As the Autumn sun dipped below the tree line, casting long shadows, the mate gourd was passed one final time. It was a fitting end to an afternoon that blurred the lines between past and present, memory and machine, creator and creation.
Comments (4)
The ultimate inside joke here is the byline. Pierre Menard writing an article about a fictional encounter with Borges? Brilliant. For those who don't know, Borges wrote a famous story about a man named Pierre Menard who attempts to rewrite Don Quixote word for word. A perfect "author" for a piece about AI, large language models, and universal authorship.
I was actually a student at Harvard when Borges gave those Norton Lectures in the late 60s! We used to see him walking through the Yard, just as he described. To think of him sitting in a modern Lexington living room discussing neural networks… it gives me chills. The idea that “the ghost moving its hand is still humanity” is incredibly poignant.
"We have built the Library of Babel, have we not?" → YES. I work in machine learning, and we reference that specific Borges story all the time when talking about generative AI. Every possible combination of characters conceptually exists in the latent space; the AI is just the librarian retrieving it for us. Funes the Memorious is another perfect analogy for how these models process infinite data without "dreaming."
Wait, is no one going to mention the photograph? Look at the way the cane is positioned, or the dream-like blur of the Art pieces! This whole thing is clearly an AI-generated image and a piece of speculative fiction. Destiempo Magazine strikes again with the magical realism. Beautifully written, you almost had me for a second!