I generally write here about topics related to online marketing with the goal of being useful to local businesses. This is a bit different, apologies in advance for my transgression.

One of my favorite authors is Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentinian writer who was also for a time the Director of the National Public Library of Argentina. He mostly wrote short stories, and his stories were often explorations of the quest for knowledge in the face of overwhelming quantities of information. That he wrote about this subject before the advent of computers and digitized information gives him a unique perspective on an area that I struggle with constantly.

One story in particular has been on my mind quite a bit recently, “Funes the Memorious.” The story describes a boy who fell from a horse and acquired a perfect memory, the ability to remember every sensory detail of everything he had ever experienced. The story is written from the point of view of Borges, who ends up spending a night in conversation with Funes. At the beginning of the conversation the reader feels awe and even envy at the boy’s talents. He learned Latin in a matter of days, and said of his life before the fall that he “looked without seeing, listened without hearing, forgetting everything, almost everything.”

Of late I feel like I am capsized in a whitewater of media. I find myself wanting to comb through it all, to find fragments of knowledge and moments of human contact. Twitter epitomizes this for me. In Facebook I am mostly connected to people I already know. I use it to keep in touch, and to engage in casual interaction. In Twitter I am struck by the stark contrast between the torrents of repeated chatter and the occasional bit of insight making its way downstream. I learn new things and make new friends, but I also find myself wishing I were more like Funes. Where I find myself dragged under by the turbulence, Funes would find it as calm as a reflecting pool. Funes could follow a thousand twitterers and give every one due attention, even a thousand thousand.

But to be Funes is not a thing to wish for. Borges describes his plight:

It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to turn one’s mind from the world; Funes, lying on his back on his cot in the shadows, could imagine every crevice and every molding in the shaply defined houses surrounding him. (I repeat that the least important of his memories was more minute and more vivid than our perception of physical pleasure or physical torment.)

Borges further explains that “to think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence.” Another way of looking at it is that ideas are given meaning by the spaces in between. If we think of everything that is called a “dog” as an individual entity without generalizing, it becomes difficult to tell where dogs end and jackals or wolves begin. This is the problem I have with media today. It affords me no spaces in which to build archetypes or even to let one individual stand out from the next. Sometimes I find it difficult to sleep, difficult to turn my mind from the stream.

I like to solve problems, but I can’t say as I’ve made much progress with this one. I think we are all suffering the plight of Funes to some extent. Some solve it by shutting off all of the streams, but that is not the right solution for me. I like meeting new people and learning new things, and to shut myself off from media would be to exclude myself from the prevailing currents of culture. Borges saw the coming challenges of an information society but he did not turn away from them, he faced them head on. We will find ways to bridge differences and make abstractions that allow us to be infinitely connected and yet sleep peacefully. In my own small way I hope to be part of that.

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