object:The Wall and the BOoks
class:Essay
class:chapter
author class:Jorge Luis Borges
The Wall and the Books
He, whose long wall the wand'ring Tartar bounds. . .
Dunciad, II, 76
I
read, some days past, that the man who ordered the erection of the almost
infinite wall of China was that first Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who also
decreed that all books prior to him be burned. That these two vast operations
—the five to six hundred leagues of stone opposing the barbarians, the
rigorous abolition of history, that is, of the past—should originate in one
person and be in some way his attributes inexplicably satisfied and, at the
same time, disturbed me. To investigate the reasons for that emotion is the
purpose of this note.
Historically speaking, there is no mystery in the two measures. A
contemporary of the wars of Hannibal, Shih Huang Ti, king of Tsin, brought
the Six Kingdoms under his rule and abolished the feudal system; he erected
the wall, because walls were defenses; he burned the books, because his
opposition invoked them to praise the emperors of olden times. Burning
books and erecting fortifications is a common task of princes; the only thing
singular in Shih Huang Ti was the scale on which he operated. Such is
suggested by certain Sinologists, but I feel that the facts I have related are
something more than an exaggeration or hyperbole of trivial dispositions.
Walling in an orchard or a garden is ordinary, but not walling in an empire.
Nor is it banal to pretend that the most traditional of races renounce the
memory of its past, mythical or real. The Chinese had three thousand years
of chronology (and during those years, the Yellow Emperor and Chuang Tsu
and Confucius and Lao Tzu) when Shih Huang Ti ordered that history begin
with him.
Shih Huang Ti had banished his mother for being a libertine; in his
stern justice the orthodox saw nothing but an impiety; Shih Huang Ti,
perhaps, wanted to obliterate the canonical books because they accused him;
Shih Huang Ti, perhaps, tried to abolish the entire past in order to abolish
one single memory: his mother's infamy. (Not in an unlike manner did a
king of Judea have all male children killed in order to kill one.) This
conjecture is worthy of attention, but tells us nothing about the wall, the
second part of the myth. Shih Huang Ti, according to the historians, forbade
179that death be mentioned and sought the elixir of immortality and secluded
himself in a figurative palace containing as many rooms as there are days in
the year; these facts suggest that the wall in space and the fire in time were
magic barriers designed to halt death. All things long to persist in their
being, Baruch Spinoza has written; perhaps the Emperor and his sorcerers
believed that immortality is intrinsic and that decay cannot enter a closed
orb. Perhaps the Emperor tried to recreate the beginning of time and called
himself The First, so as to be really first, and called himself Huang Ti, so as
to be in some way Huang Ti, the legendary emperor who invented writing
and the compass. The latter, according to the Book of Rites, gave things their
true name; in a parallel fashion, Shih Huang Ti boasted, in inscriptions
which endure, that all things in his reign would have the name which was
proper to them. He dreamt of founding an immortal dynasty; he ordered that
his heirs be called Second Emperor, Third Emperor, Fourth Emperor, and so
on to infinity. . . I have spoken of a magical purpose; it would also be fitting
to suppose that erecting the wall and burning the books were not
simultaneous acts. This (depending on the order we select) would give us the
image of a king who began by destroying and then resigned himself to
preserving, or that of a disillusioned king who destroyed what he had
previously defended. Both conjectures are dramatic, but they lack, as far as I
know, any basis in history. Herbert Allen Giles tells that those who hid
books were branded with a red-hot iron and sentenced to labor until the day
of their death on the construction of the outrageous wall. This information
favors or tolerates another interpretation. Perhaps the wall was a metaphor,
perhaps Shih Huang Ti sentenced those who worshiped the past to a task as
immense, as gross and as useless as the past itself. Perhaps the wall was a
challenge and Shih Huang Ti thought: "Men love the past and neither I nor
my executioners can do anything against that love, but someday there will
be a man who feels as I do and he will efface my memory and be my
shadow and my mirror and not know it." Perhaps Shih Huang Ti walled in
his empire because he knew that it was perishable and destroyed the books
because he understood that they were sacred books, in other words, books
that teach what the entire universe or the mind of every man teaches.
Perhaps the burning of the libraries and the erection of the wall are
operations which in some secret way cancel each other.
The tenacious wall which at this moment, and at all moments, casts its
system of shadows over lands I shall never see, is the shadow of a Caesar
180who ordered the most reverent of nations to burn its past; it is plausible that
this idea moves us in itself, aside from the conjectures it allows. (Its virtue
may lie in the opposition of constructing and destroying on an enormous
scale.) Generalizing from the preceding case, we could infer that all forms
have their virtue in themselves and not in any conjectural "content." This
would concord with the thesis of Benedetto Croce; already Pater in 1877 had
affirmed that all arts aspire to the state of music, which is pure form. Music,
states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights
and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should
not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a
revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.
Translated by J.E.I.
book class:Labyrinths
questions, comments, suggestions/feedback, take-down requests, contribute, etc
contact me @ integralyogin@gmail.com or via the comments below
or join the integral discord server (chatrooms)
if the page you visited was empty, it may be noted and I will try to fill it out. cheers