Patrick Wolff

Editorial Content Analyst and Writer at Thomas Publishing. Graduated from SUNY Oneonta with a Bachelor of Science in English. Former intern and staff writer/editor at The Deli Magazine and the Oneonta State Times.

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World of Dreams in Borges and Dillard

        The similarities and contrasts between Jorge Luis Borges and Annie Dillard are plentiful, and one could write an entire paper on a comparison between the two writers. What caught my eye in particular during my reading of their works was the way in which they convey their sense of the world. In their respective essays, “Blindness” and “Seeing,” the two authors invent a similar image of the world as something magical or dreamlike. However, the two authors manage to invent this image through fundamentally opposed physical states, these being blindness in Borges and sight in Dillard. 
         In the case of Borges, he makes mention of the fact that he still retains some measure of sight in one eye while being totally blind in the other. He notes that as a result of this mixture of sight and blindness, he is able to see some colors, such as yellow and blue, and not others, lamenting his loss of the color red in particular. As Borges informs the reader, because of his blindness he no longer sleeps in darkness but rather “in this world of mist, in the greenish or bluish mist, vaguely luminous, which is the world of the blind” (377). The state of being blind, as Borges describes it, is dreamlike and reminiscent of someplace mystical. Later on in the essay, Borges explains that although blindness has taken from him the visible world, it has given him access to the “aural world of the Anglo-Saxon language”, a world of which he had previously been unaware (381).
        Dillard, on the other hand, finds the mystical in what she can see rather than what she cannot. At one point she describes what she calls the “now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t affair” of nature, using wonder-inducing metaphors such as “A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades in leaves,” to illustrate for the reader what she sees (694). These metaphors for events that are so often perceived simply as acts of nature make the world sound as though it were a grand cosmic dream. Throughout the essay she picks ordinary things that she can see with her own eyes, at one point stating that perceiving the gifts and magic of nature is “all a matter of keeping my eyes open,” and turns them into wonderful metaphors. She breathes magic into whatever she can see, whether it is a blade of grass, a deer, or the stars in the sky, which she marvels at for allowing her to see into the cosmic past.
       Both Borges and Dillard succeed in illustrating for their readers a picture of the world as they see it. Their ability to take the things that see, or in Borges’ case cannot see, and turn them into literary paintings is astounding. Although they see the world through different physical states, they both manage to find some degree of magic or mysticism within it.