I was thumbing through Borges’ Collected Fictions this afternoon when I came across one of my favorite stories by the great Argentine fabulist, Inferno, I, 32. Its profundity is matched only by its brevity, so here it is in toto:

From the half-light of dawn to the half-light of evening, the eyes of a leopard, in the last years of the twelfth century, looked upon a few wooden boards, some vertical iron bars, some varying men and women, a blank wall, and perhaps a stone gutter littered with dry leaves. The leopard did not know, could not know, that it yearned for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing flesh and a breeze with the scent of deer, but something inside it was suffocating and howling in rebellion, and God spoke to it in a dream: You shall live and die in this prison, so that a man that I have knowledge of may see you a certain number of times and never forget you and put your figure and your symbol into a poem, which has its exact place in the weft of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you shall have given a word to the poem. In the dream, God illuminated the animal’s crude understanding and the animal grasped the reasons and accepted its fate, but when it awoke there was only an obscure resignation in it, a powerful ignorance, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of a savage beast.

Years later, Dante was to die in Ravenna, as unjustified and alone as any other man. In a dream, God told him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, astonished, learned at last who he was and what he was, and he blessed the bitternesses of his life. Legend has it that when he awoke, he sensed that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something he would never be able to recover, or even to descry from afar, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of men.

This is wonderful, wonderful stuff. Borges is ostensibly honoring Dante Alighieri here of course, that cornerstone of Western literature who died in bitter exile at Ravenna, but the crux of the story is Borges’ conception of the true nature of reality (also advanced in Paradiso, XXXI, 108 – a companion piece of sorts) as an idea so beyond our ability to comprehend it that it can be delivered to us only in a dream, whereupon waking we remember almost nothing of what was revealed, save for the feeling that we have “received and lost an infinite thing.” For this was a truth that would have awakened us to our true purpose in life, a truth through which we would have found redemption for every sorrow and hurt that we’d suffered, a truth that would have made everything make sense. Tragic enough. But the real tragedy, Borges argues, is that we could never grasp this truth even if it were told to us in waking life, for the nature of existence — with, among other things, its labyrinthine web of connections between everything and everyone — is simply too inscrutable for human beings to understand. As Borges himself put it:

What about truth? I don’t know. It would be very strange for us to be able to understand it. In one of my short stories I speak about that. I was rereading ”The Divine Comedy,” and, as you will remember, in the first canto, Dante has two or three animals, and one of them is a leopard. The editor points out that a leopard was brought to Florence in Dante’s time and that Dante, like any citizen of Florence, must have seen that leopard, and so he put a leopard into the first canto of the ”Inferno.” In my story, ”Inferno, I, 32,” I imagine that in a dream the leopard is told it has been created so Dante can see it and use it in his poem. The leopard understands that in the dream, but when he awakens, naturally, how could he understand that he exists only so a man could write a poem and use him in it? And I said that if the reason he wrote ”The Divine Comedy” had been revealed to Dante, he could have understood it in a dream but not when he awoke. That reason would be as complex for Dante as the other one was for the leopard.

To Borges then, to describe the true nature of reality, or the “meaning” of existence, to human beings is every bit as bootless as trying to explain a poem to a leopard. We simply lack to capacity to fathom it. It’s a sentiment as tantalizing as it is unnerving.