sleepyphilosophyradio

There Is A Book That Contains Your Death | Borges's Complete Philosophy For Sleep

May 16, 2026·2h 54m
Episode Description from the Publisher

Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/voteSomewhere in an infinite library, there is a book that contains the date of your death. Tonight, fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Jorge Luis Borges.Tonight we step inside the mind of the blind Argentine librarian who thought in fictions and dreamed in paradoxes. Jorge Luis Borges was not a philosopher who wrote systematic treatises. He was a storyteller who turned philosophical problems into fables so precise and beautiful that physicists, neuroscientists, and literary theorists are still catching up to him. Over the next three hours, we walk through twenty chapters of his life and work, from the childhood library in Palermo to the quiet grave in Geneva, from Funes the Memorious to The Library of Babel to the Aleph in a Buenos Aires basement. These are stories about memory, infinity, identity, dreams, and the suspicion that the universe itself might be a text we are only partially able to read.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.(0:00:00) The Boy in the Library(0:08:25) A Child Between Languages(0:16:45) Geneva and the War Years(0:25:19) Return to Buenos Aires(0:34:29) The Man Who Could Not Forget(0:43:37) The Library of Babel(0:52:42) Pierre Menard's Quixote(1:00:42) Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius(1:09:26) The Garden of Forking Paths(1:18:44) The Circular Ruins(1:27:22) The Aleph(1:35:53) The Immortal(1:44:26) The Blindness(1:53:14) Death and the Compass(2:02:17) Borges and I(2:11:04) The Sand and the Forking(2:19:19) The Political Wounds(2:28:36) Borges Among the Philosophers(2:37:36) Geneva, Again(2:45:42) The Labyrinth RemainsMusic by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. All research and writing is done personally.If this helped you rest, consider following Sleepy Philosophy Radio for more gentle, longform philosophy.

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