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Not that one is the first to see something new, but that one sees as new what is old, long, familiar, seen and overlooked by everybody, is what distinguishes tr

• swombat 18y ago
  See, even the idea that original ideas are not original is not original. If only Borges was around to help guide us, we'd probably found that Nietzsche got this idea, in slightly different form, from an 18th century academician, who in turn was able to lift it from the writings of a Russian monk, who in turn found it in a little-known greek play. From André Maurois' preface to Borges' Labyrinths (about Borges): His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound - he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas - but it is vast. For example, Pascal wrote: 'Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.' Borges sets out to hunt down this metaphor through the centuries. He finds it in Giordano Bruno (1584): 'We can assert with certainty that the universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.' But Giordano Bruno had been able to read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a formulation borrowed from the Corpus Hermeticum (third century): 'God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.'