It's such a wonderful thing to be reminded of how silly it is to take language seriously. IMO it's prickles and goo[1] all the way down - and the prickles help us share meaning and exchange information, but there is no project of exactitude to be completed.

The hubris it takes to maintain the view that we can just keep figuring things out if we are rational enough is also sometimes overwhelming to me. It's not that we can't understand things better through analysis, just that it sometimes seems foolish to me to try to get all of it through system-2 type behavior. We will always miss something crucial[2].

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4vHnM8WPvU

[2]:https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...

If you haven't run across it yet you would enjoy Borges and Me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borges_and_Me:_An_Encounter

I remember a PostSecret from many years ago that was a picture of the title plate of Ficciones, and the "secret" was somebody saying they wished that they could have just one night in front of a fire with a bottle of malt whiskey and the person who introduced them to that work. I had never read Borges before, but I liked that sort of a feeling a book could create, so I trudged to the bookshop and found a copy, and then settled into a corner of a cosy pub (I live in England), not far from a fire and a golden retriever, with a pint of ale and settled in.

Changed my life, when it comes to literature.

The feelings you get from that work are hard to describe, but unique and engaging and marvellous. But when you step back and look at it from a critical reading, it's all a bit odd and silly and mocking.

There is no writer I want in my pocket more than Borges though, particularly when it's dark and cold outside and the fire is burning, and a friend who also appreciates him is nearby to discuss.

Menard's Quixote is also one of my favorites. I feel it illustrates almost in a mean way the futility and arrogance of analyzing a work through its author's life and intention. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if this kind of literary analysis was still popular in Borges' time and place, but in France up to the early 20th century, an influential critic called Sainte-Beuve was claiming with great success that any work could be entirely (and scientifically) analyzed and elucidated by interviewing the author's friends, partners, by sniffing out their secret habits and what not -- and I assume Borges must've been aware of it, having been educated in early 20th century French-speaking Switzerland. If I had another life I'd probably do another PhD thesis on Borges vs Sainte-Beuve. Fun fact: Marcel Proust was so mad at Sainte-Beuve that it got him out of his writer's block; In Search of Lost Time is an anti-Sainte-Beuve essay that got out of hand.

I read that after seeing it was a forgotten inspiration for Piranesi: https://www.betterreading.com.au/news/author-related/susanna...

(And probably House of Leaves)

It was lost on me at first because I had none of the background, it's now beautiful in hindsight with the context.

The last words almost make me cry everytime I read them. It's such a beautiful tale.

Holy cow, that was amazing.

I do sometimes wonder if we will get "detailed enough" vector embeddings in LLMs to bring the grain of resolution down below human perception - like having enough bits to fully capture what's on tape in audio world. Maybe this is never possible, and (I hope) some details are unresolvable, but it will be interesting to see.

That wil be doable some time with computers :)

Maybe Eco's "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1"?