Borges's Paradise

Borges was blind for the last decades of his life.

He became the director of the National Library of Argentina in 1955 — the same year his eyesight finally failed him entirely. He wrote about the cruel irony: "God gave me at one time books and blindness; I speak of the wonder and the loss."

And yet, this was the man who imagined Paradise as a library.

Not a garden. Not a throne room. A library.

Because for Borges, books weren't objects. They were worlds. Compressed universes that a blind man could still hold in his hands, still have read to him, still inhabit fully. The books didn't disappear when he lost his sight. If anything, they expanded — into imagination, into memory, into something beyond the physical page.

Paradise, for him, wasn't the absence of limitation. It was the presence of infinite possibility.

What would your Paradise look like? And what does that tell you about what actually gives your life its richness?