Extremes of fantastic hope and skepticism paradoxically coexist in Borges' thought. In 'Pascal's Sphere' he examines an image which is not only paradoxical in itself - the universe as an infinite sphere, in other words, a boundless form perfectly circumscribed - but which has also served to express diametrically opposite emotions: Bruno's elation and Pascal's anguish. But the other basic symmetry to note here is Borges' history of the metaphor. Not only paradoxes are found throughout this collection, but also various listings of ideas or themes or images which though diverse in origin and detail are essentially the same. In 'The Flower of Coleridge' the coincidence of Valery's, Emerson's, and Shelley's conceptions of all literature as the product of one Author seems itself to bear out that conception. At the beginning of the essay on Hawthorne, Borges again briefly traces the history of a metaphor - the likening of our dreams to a theatrical performance - and adds that true metaphors cannot be invented, since they have always existed. Such 'avatars' point beyond the flux and diversity of history to a realm of eternal archetypes, which, though limited in number, 'can be all things for all people, like the Apostle.' While the paradox upsets our common notions of reality and suggests that irreducible elements are actually one, recurrence negates history and the separateness of individuals. Of course, this too is a paradox, as 'New Refutation of Time' shows: time must exist in order to provide the successive identities with which it is to be 'refuted.' The two symmetries noted above, if we pursue their implications far enough, finally coalesce, with something of the same dizzying sense, so frequent in Borges' stories, of infinite permutations lurking at every turn. Both are uses of what he calls a pantheist extension of the principle of identity - God is all things: a suitably heterogeneous selection of these may allude to Totality - which has, as he notes in the essay on Whitman, unlimited rhetorical possibilities.

Literature·Paradox