In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Immortal / 99 9 The Immortal “The Immortal” is one of Borges’s longest stories. It opens with a substantial quotation of a text from Francis Bacon in which he refers to Solomon and Plato and draws an implication: there is no new thing under the sun and all knowledge is but remembrance, so all novelties are but oblivion. This is one of Borges’s favorite themes. Just as in “The Circular Ruins,” we are confronted in this story with the cyclical nature of time and the inevitability of destiny. The narrative is heavy with cryptic suggestions about immortality, the nature of the universe, human achievements, and the quest for understanding. But at the end we are left with more questions than answers. One of these is that, as in other of Borges’s fictions, it is not clear whether most of the narrative refers to reality or to a dream, for at some point the protagonist falls asleep and then awakens and many fantastic events follow. The story line is fairly clear. In London, a princess buys a copy of Pope’s Iliad from Joseph Cartaphilus, an antique bookseller from Smyrna. In the last volume, she finds a manuscript divided into five chapters in which the Roman tribune, Marcus Flaminius Rufus, tells how he threw himself into the quest for the secret City of the Immortals. He first hears about the City from a rider who, bloody and exhausted, dies at his feet asking for the river that purifies all men of death, on the far shores of which the City is located. Ignoring the advice of philosophers who claim that immortality merely multiplies a man’s deaths, Marcus throws himself into the pursuit of the City and its river to quench his thirst for immortality; he is accompanied by two hundred soldiers. After many disastrous adventures, the soldiers are about to mutiny and kill him, but he manages to escape. He is wounded by a Cretan arrow and finds himself alone, at 100 / Painting Borges which moment he sees pyramids and towers in the distance. This is the City of the Immortals, but exhausted, he falls asleep. When he wakes, his hands are tied behind his back and he is lying on an oblong niche carved into the slope of a mountain. Around him he sees little gray men, belonging to the bestial lineage of the Troglodytes, emerging from similar niches. They do not speak. Marcus throws himself down the mountain toward a polluted stream and is eventually able to free himself. The Troglodytes pay no attention to him or his pleadings. Consumed by the goal of his quest, Marcus can hardly sleep, and it appears as if the Troglodytes, divining his purpose, do not either. He crosses the stream on his way to the City and is followed by a few of the little men, although eventually only one remains. The City is built on an impregnable plateau, but Marcus finds a way in through a cave that leads to a maze through which Marcus eventually emerges onto a plaza. The City turns out to be an irrational jumble of buildings with no purpose. Its chaos horrifies him and he finds his way out. There he encounters the Troglodyte who had followed him, clumsily drawing symbols in the sand and erasing them. Suspecting some intellectual capacity in the man, Marcus tries to teach him but it is all in vain. He names him Argos, after the moribund old dog of the Odyssey. One day there is rain, and this seems to waken the village, and Argos speaks. He is Homer. Marcus now achieves an epiphany, he understands. The Troglodytes are the Immortals. They had destroyed their City nine hundred years before and built a new one in its place “as a temple to the irrational gods that rule the world and to those gods about whom we know nothing save that they do not resemble man.” At that point, thinking that all effort is vain, they decided to live in thought, devoting themselves to speculation. After centuries of living, they reached “a perfection of tolerance,” for they realized that in the long run all things happen to everyone. We are all things, god, hero, philosopher, demon, and world. Nothing happens only once, and nothing is ever lost, and this presumably is immortality. Homer and Marcus part in Tangier, and Marcus goes on his way to be many things in many places. The account appears...

Share