According to Borges, humans feel the need to belong to a grand universal plan, something bigger than ourselves. Religion does it for some people, soccer for others. Characters in the Borgesian corpus often grapple with this desire, turning to ideologues or movements to disastrous effect: The narrator of the story “Deutsches Requiem” becomes a Nazi, while in “The Lottery in Babylon” and “The Congress,” small, innocuous-seeming organizations quickly transform into vast, totalitarian bureaucracies that dole out corporal punishment or burn books. We want to be a part of something bigger, so much so that we blind ourselves to the flaws that develop in these grand plans—or the flaws that were inherent to them all along. And yet, as the narrator of “The Congress” reminds us, the allure of these grand narratives often proves too much: “What really matters is having felt that our plan, which more than once we made a joke of, really and secretly existed and was the world and ourselves.” That sentence could accurately describe how millions of people on Earth feel about soccer. (Just a perspective)
Posted on: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 07:05:30 +0000
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