When Ireneo Funes looked at a glass of  wine on a table, he saw “all the shoots, clusters, and  grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds  in the south at the dawn of the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his  recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book  which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray  which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the  battle of the Quebrancho.” In the short story “Funes, the Memorious,” Jorge Luis Borges explores what it would  be like to have a perfect memory. His character not only remembers  everything he has ever seen, but every time he has seen  it in perfect detail. These details are so overwhelming Funes has to spend his days  in a dark room, and can only sleep by imagining a part  of town he has never visited. According to Borges, Funes’s memories even rendered him  incapable of real thought, because “To think is to forget a  difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes  there were nothing but details.” Funes’ limitless memory was just one  of Borges’s many explorations of infinity. Born in Argentina in 1899, he admired the revolutionaries  of his mother’s family but took after his father’s bookish clan. His body of essays, poems, and stories,  or, as he called them, ficciones pioneered the literary style of  “lo real maravilloso,” known in English as Magical Realism— and each was just a few pages long. Though Borges was not interested in  writing long books, he was an avid reader, recruiting friends to read to him  after he went blind in middle age. He said his image of paradise was an  infinite library, an idea he brought to life in  “The library of Babel.” Built out of countless identical rooms, each containing the same number of  books of the same length, the library of babel is its own universe. It contains every possible  variation of text, so there are some profound books, but also countless tomes  of complete gibberish. The narrator has spent his entire life wandering this vast labyrinth  of information in a possibly futile search for meaning. Labyrinths appeared over and over  in Borges’ work. In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” as Yu Tsun winds his way through  country roads, he remembers a lost labyrinth  built by one of his ancestors. Over the course of the story, he finds out the labyrinth is not a  physical maze but a novel. And this novel reveals that the real  Garden of Forking Paths is time: in every instant, there are infinite  possible courses of action. And as one moment follows another, each possibility begets another  set of divergent futures. Borges laid out infinite expanses of time in his labyrinths, but he also explored the idea of  condensing all of time into a single moment. In “The God’s Script,” at the very beginning of the world the god writes exactly one message into the spots of the jaguars, who then “love and reproduce without end, in caverns, in cane fields, on islands, in order that the last men  might receive it.” The last man turns out to be a tenacious old priest who spends years memorizing and  deciphering the jaguar’s spots, culminating in an epiphany where he  finally understands the god’s message. Imprisoned deep underground, he has no one to share this meaning with, and it changes nothing  about his circumstances, but he doesn’t mind: in that one moment, he has experienced all the experience of everyone who has ever existed. Reading Borges, you might catch a glimpse of infinity too.