“The Wall and the Books” takes up four pages in Other Inquisitions, published in 1952. It is, I believe, the most perfect essay Borges ever wrote. And since Borges wrote dozens of essays that could lay claim to that title, the statement is not a small one.
It opens with a historical fact that Borges presents for what it is: a fact that unsettles him. The emperor Shih Huang Ti, the man who unified China in the third century before Christ, the man who ordered the construction of the Great Wall, was also the man who ordered every book written before his reign to be burned. The same man. The same act of will. The largest construction in human history and the largest destruction of the written record, carried out by the same person, at very nearly the same time.
Borges makes no claim to being a historian. He cares little whether the details are exact, whether the burning was total or partial, whether the wall was built from nothing or over earlier fortifications. What interests him is something else: the conjunction. The fact that building and destroying coexist in a single exercise of power, and that this coexistence means something, even if he cannot say what.
The essay is the attempt to find out. And the extraordinary thing is that it doesn’t. Borges proposes hypotheses, examines them, sets them aside, proposes others, and in the end reaches no conclusion. He reaches something better.
The Hypotheses
Borges is honest with his hypotheses. He lays them on the table one at a time, turns them over, lets them go.
First hypothesis: Shih Huang Ti burned the books because the books contained the past, and the past was a threat. Whoever controls the past controls the present. Burning the books meant erasing all prior history so that history would begin with him. A political hypothesis, reasonable enough, and Borges accepts it as plausible but insufficient. It doesn’t explain the wall.
Second hypothesis: the wall and the burning are complementary operations. The wall closes off space. The burning closes off time. Shih Huang Ti wanted to found an order that was absolute in both dimensions: nothing from outside can enter, nothing from before can survive. A more elegant hypothesis, and Borges likes it better, but it doesn’t quite satisfy him either. Too symmetrical, too neat. Reality is seldom that tidy.
Third hypothesis: Shih Huang Ti knew the wall and the burning were impossible enterprises. No wall holds back the barbarians forever. No burning eliminates every book. And perhaps that was the point: not to achieve the objective but to attempt it. The grandeur of the gesture, not its efficacy. This is a hypothesis that appeals to Borges because it turns Shih Huang Ti into something like an artist: a man who undertakes something vast in the knowledge that it will fail, and who finds in the failure a form of magnificence.
Borges chooses none of them. He lets them coexist, like layers of a single perplexity. And then, in the final paragraphs, he does something characteristically Borgesian: he drops the hypotheses and shifts register. He stops analysing and begins to feel. Or more precisely, he acknowledges that what he felt from the start, the emotion that drove him to write the essay in the first place, was not analytical in nature but aesthetic. He didn’t want to explain Shih Huang Ti. He wanted to understand why the image of Shih Huang Ti moved him.
The Sentence
“Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces moulded by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or told us something we should not have lost, or are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced is, perhaps, the aesthetic fact.”
You have to read it slowly. You have to read it more than once. Because what it says is simple and what it implies is vast.
It says that art is not the revelation. It is not the moment of understanding. It is the moment just before understanding. The feeling that something is about to be said, that a meaning is there, almost within reach, almost visible, and that it never quite arrives. That imminence, that almost, is the aesthetic fact. Not what is understood. What is nearly understood. Not the answer. The question that feels as though it is on the verge of having one.
It is a definition that contradicts nearly everything Western aesthetics had said before. For Aristotle, art is imitation that produces pleasure through recognition. For Kant, it is the experience of the beautiful as purposiveness without purpose. For Hegel, it is the sensory manifestation of the idea. In every case, art arrives somewhere. It produces something: pleasure, knowledge, revelation. Borges says no. Art is the state of not arriving. The door that doesn’t open. The phrase on the tip of your tongue that won’t come out.
And the remarkable thing is that this definition, which sounds like frustration, is not frustrating at all. It is the exact opposite. Borges is describing an experience we all recognise: the moment you hear a piece of music that moves you and you cannot say why, the moment you see a sunset that seems to mean something and you cannot say what, the moment you read a line of poetry that stops you cold and you can’t explain what it was that stopped you. That experience is not a failure of comprehension. It is a form of comprehension that exceeds what conceptual language can capture. And Borges, with that one sentence, gives it a name.
The Key
“The Wall and the Books” works as a key to the whole of Borges. Not because all his texts deal with the same thing, which they don’t. But because all his texts practise what this essay describes: the imminence of a revelation that never comes.
“The Aleph” presents a point that contains every point in the universe. Borges describes it, catalogues it in a list famous for its vertiginous accumulation, and then says that language is sequential and what he saw was simultaneous, and that therefore he cannot convey it. The revelation occurred but cannot be communicated. The story is the imminence of that communication: we sense that something enormous was seen, but what we read is only the shadow of the Aleph, not the Aleph itself.
“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” describes a world invented by a secret society that begins to replace the real one. An idea that seems to be telling us something fundamental about the relation between fiction and reality, between language and the world, and every time you think you’ve grasped it the story shifts slightly and the understanding dissolves. Not because it is confused. Because it is precise about something that is, by its nature, imprecise.
“The Circular Ruins” tells the story of a man who dreams another man into existence and discovers at the end that he too is being dreamed. An image that wants to say something about reality, about identity, about the nature of the self, and what it wants to say is always one step beyond what the story actually says. The story points. It doesn’t arrive. And in that pointing lies its perfection.
In every case, what Borges produces is exactly what he describes in “The Wall and the Books”: the sensation that a meaning is there, nearly accessible, nearly formulable, and that it will not let itself be formulated. Not because Borges can’t manage it. Because meaning of that kind exists only as imminence, and would destroy itself if made concrete, the way a dream dissolves the moment you try to tell it.
Why It Is the Best Definition
There are many definitions of art. Some are useful, some are clever, some are deep. Borges’ is the best for a reason that strikes me as decisive: it is the only one that explains why art does not exhaust itself.
If art were revelation, if a work told you something and you understood it, there would be no reason to return to it. You understood. That’s that. Move on. But that is not how it works. You return to Bach, return to Shakespeare, return to Borges, and each time you find something new, not because the work has changed but because you have, and the imminence of the revelation reconfigures itself according to who you are now. The door still hasn’t opened, but what you imagine on the other side is different every time.
That is what the other definitions fail to capture. Aristotle explains why art produces pleasure but not why the pleasure renews itself. Kant explains why art is universal but not why it is inexhaustible. Hegel explains why art has content but not why the content resists paraphrase. Borges, in a single sentence, explains all of it: art is inexhaustible because what it offers is not a meaning but the promise of a meaning, and the promise, unlike the meaning, is never fulfilled, and so it never stops working.
There is something sad in this idea and something consoling. Sad because it implies we will never get there, that complete understanding is an illusion, that the door does not open. Consoling because it implies there will always be more, that the work of art never empties itself out, that wonder is renewable. If you want to read it in theological terms, it is the aesthetic version of Christian hope: you don’t arrive, but the road is infinite, and the infinity of the road is, in itself, a form of grace.
Borges closed “The Wall and the Books” with that sentence and closed, whether he knew it or knew it perfectly well, his entire aesthetics. Everything he wrote before and after is a variation on that idea. An imminence of revelation that never comes. A meaning perpetually about to appear. An emperor who builds a wall and burns the books, and in doing so says something that twenty centuries later we are still trying to hear.