| Name: |
Jorge Luis Borges |
| Birth Date: |
|
| Death Date: |
|
| Place of Birth: |
|
| Place of Death: |
|
| Nationality: |
|
| Gender: |
|
| Occupations: |
|
Although Ireneo Funes, a Uruguayan teenager, was paralyzed and confined to his chair, he "knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once." Funes remembered every moment of his life, and he had spent entire days recreating his past with his memory. His remarkable memory also allowed him to master English, French, Portuguese, and Latin.
Funes's amazing memory was accompanied by fantastic perception. "We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up a grape vine." While Funes's gifts intensified or enriched his sedentary existence, they also troubled him at times. Funes found it difficult "to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front)." Funes distracted himself by giving names like "meat blanket" and "sulphur" to numbers from one beyond twenty-four thousand ("In place of five hundred, he would say nine").
This is a free page. This page contains 151 words. This
biography contains 5,071 words (approx. 17 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Jorge Luis Borges Access Pass.
