Many, many things have been said and written about Jorge Luis Borges, almost all of them very complimentary. Despite this, literary critics who have analyzed him in depth are unable to agree on the scope and virtues of his vast work. … To simplify, we could point out that, within this group of experts, there are two large factions. On one side are those who defend and value the preciousness of the literary language in which he expressed himself, the meticulous craftsmanship to which he succumbed every time he took up the pen to write poetry, short stories or essays. On the other hand, those who place emphasis on the content, on their erudition and narrative genius or on the power of the fables, plots and subtexts that appear in practically all of their poems and stories. Nobody or almost nobody has noticed that Borges, in addition to possessing all these virtues, was also a visionary. The proof of his ability to anticipate events or even to prophesy them is found in a ten-page narrative whose title, ‘The Aleph’, coincides with the name of the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and which was published for the first time. in September 1945 in issue 131 of the Argentine magazine ‘Sur’.
In case someone has not read it, the plot of this story, which is almost the least of it, revolves around the discovery of a wonderful artifact that, in addition to having remained hidden in the “nineteenth step” of the basement of a building located in Garay Street awaits its imminent destruction. It is then that its discoverer and owner, Carlos Argentino Daneri, decides to confess to the protagonist of the narrative, who is none other than Borges himself, the discovery of this prodigious device. When he goes to the place that has been indicated to him, what he discovers is “a small iridescent sphere, of almost intolerable brilliance” whose diameter is around “two or three centimeters.” What’s more, the object turns out to be a microcosm, a multum in parvo, a skylight through which the entire universe can be seen even in its smallest details. Whoever looks into it obtains the same capacity that characterized that panoptic eye that was represented in the school books of our childhood. He who looks through the Aleph acquires the power to observe everything, record everything, meddle in everything because it is “the place where all the places of the world are, without being confused, seen from all angles.”
At this point, I think there is no need to continue or go into more details. The parallelism or analogy is more than evident. The Aleph that Borges invokes and refers to resembles point by point the computer network that, for a few decades, technology has made available to us. A network to scrutinize and from which to access a good part of the world or the reality that surrounds us, a metastatic network that does not stop growing and no one knows where it will lead us.
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