The Morgan Library & Museaum

So, who else was floored by the photo exhibit at the end of the tour?! Elliott, I know you and I were.

I loved looking at the artifacts, the quarto and the folio with the pages misprinted, but I couldn't seem to get away from the photos at the end. I know I ranted at a few of you, but I'll do it again here because I'm just that passionate. Did any of you catch the portrait of Jorge Luis Borges? For those who don't know him, he's my blind Argentinean philosopher and was President of the National Libraries of Argentina for quite some time. He began to lose his sight in his 20's while studying in Europe and by the time he cam back and became involved politically, he was pretty much blind as a bat. Once the political climate settled down, he came to the forefront as an expert on Argentinean literature and poetry. I love his work and would recommend his poetry if you've got 5 minutes and want to read something breathtaking (my favorite might be "Poem Written In A Copy of Beowulf"). He would wait for students from the university serving detentions to wander by his office and snag them, forcing them to sit for hours and copy down the poetry he had written in his head. He once had some kind of organ-located-in-the-torso surgery with no drugs or anesthetic: he spent the 2 hour procedure lecturing the surgeons on the history of Argentinean literature. I just love this man.

He was kind of an odd duck. In a lecture called "Blindness" he said that what he missed most is the color red--the passion of it, the taste of it. He says blindness is not darkness but a sort of shifting gray pantomime, shadows of what really is. You can see it in his glazed, shifting eyes and drooping left eyelid, the way he leans his head on his cane as though waiting for an unfortunate student to dictate his verse to. You can almost see the cogs ticking behind his eyes....

Also, on an altogether unrelated note, Dali looked positively mad. Anyone else wild about this exhibit and/or tempted to go back on one of their free nights?