The Circular Ruins

“No one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe as it sank into the sacred mud, and yet within days there was no one who did not know that the taciturn man had come there from the South, and that his homeland was one of those infinite villages that lie up-river, on the violent flank of the mountain, where the language of the Zend is uncontaminated by Greek and where leprosy is uncommon.”

The opening sentence provides a wealth of information about the setting without revealing where or when the story takes place. The bamboo canoe implies a tropical location, but the reference to the Zend language points to ancient eastern Iran. By providing so many seemingly random details, Borges sets his story nowhere, or anywhere.

“This magical objective had come to fill his entire soul; if someone had asked him his own name or inquired into any feature of his life till then, he would not have been able to answer.”

On first reading, this line seems like an exaggeration of the protagonist’s obsession with dreaming up a man. However, once the reader realizes that the whole story is circuitous, it gains new meaning. The dreamer is himself being dreamed, meaning that his mentor has erased his memories and that he has been created to carry out this single task.

“The faces of those farthest away hung at many centuries’ distance and at a cosmic height, yet they were absolutely clear.”

Here, Borges captures the essence of a dream, emphasizing how impossible and contradictory things are possible within the realm of imagination. In reality, distant faces become indistinguishable blurs and past centuries cease to be visible. However, for the dreamer, each stands out in perfect detail.