The Story Archive

The Circular Ruins

Jorge Luis Borges · 1940 CE · Short Story · Latin American · Modernist

A grey man beaches his canoe at a burned circular temple upriver, having come for one purpose: to dream a man in complete detail and impose him on reality. Night after night he assembles a student from an imagined lecture hall, fails, starts again organ by organ, and petitions the fire god of the ruins to animate what he has shaped. Three pages on the independence of a made thing.

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