THE ALEPH

Jorge Luis Borges, 1945

The aleph is not a book, but is an incredible story that belongs to a fantastic genre.
How could you define the infinite without take off his main quality, the undefinable,
maybe this story is a good idea to try to approach and get some intellectual
entertainment through one of the most brilliance mind of the twentieth century who
must have won the Nobel prize of literature.

However, everyone should be read this awesome short story, symbol of symbols of
many cultures, religions, poems, stories that as the name reminds Aleph or Alef (‫)א‬, is
the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the number 1 in Hebrew. Its esoteric
meaning in Judaic Kabbalah, as denoted in the theological treatise Bahir, relates to the
origin of the universe, the "primordial one that contains all numbers.”

The story starts with the memory of Beatriz Viterbo, the girl who could keep alive to the
narrator, despite of she is dead. The narrator, who is at the same time the character of
the story use to visit the relative’s house of Viterbo each anniversary of her death and
talk with her family, but specially with her cousin who is a writer too.

The story unfolds through references of poems, literary analysis and other skills that
characterizes the style of Borges.

But the main factor that becomes the story a piece of art is how the experience,
knowledge and the talent of the writer allows him to create a story where he can cover
a lot of myths and beliefs of the history that tried to understand the infinite.

Let’s imagine a spider web with a lot of drops in it, each one reflecting the other and
the other and all the drops reflecting the complex group of reflects until the infinite.

This reflect is symbolized with the mirrors into the aleph, but the aleph could be all the
complex group where everything could be found, this thing, the aleph is contained in
the cellar of the cousin’s house of Viterbo, who used it to inspire himself and write
awesome things, because he could see everything in this weird thing that had the
shape of a sphere whose diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space
was there, actual and undiminished.

“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a King of infinite space.”

Abel Buen Abad Díaz / Intermediate 7