Jorge Luis Borges: Why literature is ahead of science?
“Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.”
― Jorge Luis Borges
Great literature often precedes contemporary science. The imagination of great writers senses truths that scientists are yet to discover.
The Argentinian writer Jorge Louis Borges was gifted precisely with this kind of oracular imagination.
In 1942, one of the leading Argentinian newspapers La Nación published a short fantasy story by Borges in which he inadvertently described yet unexplored inner workings of our brain.
The title of that story was ‘Funes the Memorious’.
It is a tale of a man called Ireneo Funes. The narrator (a fictional version of Borges) encounters Funes on his way to the Uruguayan village of Fray Bentos in 1884. The fictional Borges asks this man what time it is and Funes replies by telling the precise time, minute by minute, without even looking at his watch.
After a brief stay in Fray Bentos, the fictional Borges leaves it and then returns three years later in 1887. He comes back to spend some peaceful time in this remote village and brings with him books written in Latin, including Pliny’s Historia Naturalis.
Soon he receives a note from the mother of Ireneo Funes. The note says that Funes suffered a tragic…
