Marcus Flaminius Rufus, a Roman military tribune of the 1st century AD, hears of a secret river whose waters grant immortality. He finds it, drinks from it, and wanders for centuries — becoming a troglodyte, then a wanderer, then, perhaps, Homer himself. The story collapses the distinction between author and character, between one life and all lives, and leaves you with a question: if you had all the time in the universe, would you still be you?
Published Reviews
"Borges in 'The Immortal' has done what only he could do: taken the oldest human fantasy — the desire to live forever — and shown it to be not a paradise but an abyss. The story is a perfect philosophical proof dressed as an adventure tale. Nothing is wasted. Every sentence carries the full weight of the argument."
"Of all the Borges stories — and many of them are perfect — 'The Immortal' strikes me as the most philosophically ambitious, the most quietly devastating. It is a story about what time does to selfhood, and it does to the reader what time does to its protagonist: it makes it impossible to locate the original self."
Our Musings
Borges fits a complete philosophy of time, identity, and literature into roughly thirty pages, and still has room for a labyrinth, a mystery, a metatextual joke, and one of the most breathtaking final paragraphs in 20th-century prose. This is simply what Borges does. The rest of us are still trying to figure out how.
The story begins as a conventional first-person adventure narrative: a Roman tribune hears of the river, seeks it, finds it. This conventional opening is essential because the story's philosophical argument depends on defamiliarization — on making us inhabit a perspective that feels normal before revealing how abnormal it is. Marcus Flaminius Rufus is a recognizable type: the ambitious soldier seeking glory and eternal life. We understand him. We follow him willingly into the desert.
What we find there is a City of the Immortals — and it is the most terrifying city in literature. It is a labyrinth of irrational proportions, of "nine-faced walls" and "staircases without steps," built by beings who have had unlimited time and no motivation except the increasingly abstract exercise of possibility. The Immortals built this city not out of pride or vision, but out of boredom — the boredom of beings for whom nothing matters because everything is possible and nothing is final. They have long since stopped caring about it and retreated into troglodyte existence, sitting in holes in the ground, moving only when necessary. They have become, in the literal sense, sub-human.
What Eternity Costs
Here is Borges' philosophical argument in its starkest form: identity requires mortality. The self — the particular, specific, accountable self that chooses this rather than that, that risks loss, that cares about particular people and particular outcomes — is constituted by the fact that time is limited. Remove the limit, and the self gradually dissolves. Given enough time, any personality will converge with any other personality; given enough time, every experience will be repeated; given enough time, every thought will be thought and every act will be performed. The immortal is everyone and therefore no one. He is Homer and he is also you and he is also the Roman tribune who wandered into the desert looking for eternal life.
The connection to Masks of God is almost too direct to ignore: Kayin carries 13,000 years of borrowed memories and risks, at the novel's climax, losing his Sense of Self — becoming so thoroughly the repository of other identities that the original self is subsumed. Borges' immortal has already undergone that process. He is what Kayin might become. The comparison illuminates both texts.
The Literary Joke
Borges layers onto this philosophical argument a further game: the suggestion that Marcus Flaminius Rufus has, at some point, become Homer. Not metaphorically — literally. The story suggests that the blind poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey was a Roman tribune who drank from the river of immortality, wandered for centuries, wrote the great epics in the fullness of time, and eventually found his way back to mortality by drinking from another river, the Lethe. The implication — which Borges pushes on with delicious deadpan seriousness — is that all literature is ultimately one literature, that all writers are one writer, that the identity of the author is as unstable as the identity of the immortal.
This is, characteristically for Borges, both a philosophical proposition and a joke. But it's a joke that cuts. Because if all writers are Homer, then the attempt to establish authorial identity — to say "I wrote this" and have that mean something specific and unrepeatable — is already compromised. The name on the title page is, at best, a convenient fiction.
Thirty Pages That Contain Everything
We've included "The Immortal" on this list not despite its brevity but because of it. It demonstrates something that the longer works on this list sometimes struggle to show: that the density of philosophical content in a piece of fiction is not a function of its length. Borges packs into thirty pages more genuine philosophical argument than most novels manage in five hundred. And he does it while telling a story that keeps you turning pages.
If you haven't read Borges, start here. If you have, read it again. Like everything that touches on the question of identity across time, it means something different the second time around.
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