In his short fiction ‘The Book of Sand’, the book he describes assumes monstrous proportions, and is one that its owner surreptitiously transports to the Argentine National Library, and evading its staff ‘loses’ on a shelf in the basement – a book engulfed by a good many others. Here already a fictive Borges is cast in the same blur as his biographical senior, writing as narrator of ‘The Book of Sand’. In a dream of himself, in a dreamed apartment in a dream of Buenos Aires, ‘volumes’, or books that the wraith called Borges is accustomed to handle, include encyclopaedias, maps, sacred tomes, the world’s fantasies concerning itself. Someone very like him, whose domicile is Belgrano Street, in Buenos Aires, receives a caller who initially introduces himself as someone selling bibles. But bibles aren’t of interest, so the salesman, who is a Presbyterian from the Orkneys, instead sells him an octavo volume, bound in cloth, on whose spine are the words ‘Holy Writ’, and ‘Bombay’. On opening the book, the pages appear – just as in a bible – in double columns and ordered in versicles. The bookseller advises a close look at the page, since it will never be found or seen again. He goes on to say that he acquired it in exchange for a handful of rupees and a bible, from an owner who didn’t know how to read. It is impossible to find its first and last page, and is called The Book of Sand because it has no beginning or end – its very pages are terms in an infinite series. As to the bookseller’s conscience, it is clear. He is sure of not having cheated the native in exchanging the Word of God for this, a diabolic trinket.
Hume is now mentioned, one suspects in opposition to George Herbert, whose ‘Thy rope of sands’ forms the epigraph to Borges’s story about this miraculous book. Herbert, we know, balanced a secular career with a life of theological contemplation, and as poet might be said to have been in pursuit of what Derrida has called a ‘transcendental signifier’, God’s summarising logos, the last syllable of recorded time, all as the divine extension of Genesis (In the beginning, God said…), a suspiration that renders as revealed and knowable everything that has been uttered and written in between – life and the world as a sacred inscription. ‘Thy rope of sands, / Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee / Good cable, to enforce and draw, / And be thy law, / While thou didst wink and would not see.’
Above all, Herbert wants us to see God’s revealed truth – which the Presbyterian bookseller believes is written in a book, in the book. To this end his evangelism extends even to the Hindu caste system in Bombay, where he has found what to him must be the opposite of incontestable writ, what with its textual flickers, its Derridean presences and absences. One imagines that for him God’s truth is a simple truth.