I saw the teeming sea I saw daybreak and nightfall I saw the multitudes of America I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London) I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. At first I thought it was revolving then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. Left alone in the darkness of the cellar, the narrator begins to fear that Daneri is conspiring to kill him, and then he sees the Aleph for himself:

Though by now he believes Daneri to be insane, the narrator proposes to come to the house and see the Aleph for himself. Daneri becomes enraged, explaining to the narrator that he must keep the house in order to finish his poem, because the cellar contains an Aleph which he is using to write the poem. Later in the story, a business attempts to tear down Daneri's house in the course of its expansion. Over time, he comes to know her first cousin, Carlos Argentino Daneri, a mediocre poet with a vastly exaggerated view of his own talent who has made it his lifelong quest to write an epic poem that describes every single location on the planet in excruciatingly fine detail. At the beginning of the story, he is mourning the recent death of Beatriz Viterbo, a woman he loved, and he resolves to stop by the house of her family to pay his respects.

Wells's short story The Door in the Wall.Īs in many of Borges' short stories, the protagonist is a fictionalized version of the author. Borges has stated that the inspiration for this story came from H.G. The story traces the theme of infinity found in several of Borges' other works, such as ' The Book of Sand'. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping, or confusion. In Borges' story, the Aleph is a point in space that contains all other points.

El aleph book