Again, each Borges thinks they are in different places, different times, and again, the older Borges informs the younger of future events. Alarmed, he races upstairs to find an aging Borges already there. Here a younger Borges returns to his hotel room to find that his name has already been written on the daily register. The other story, “August 25, 1983,” functions in an almost identical way, except with the roles reversed. It’s like the slowly growing darkness of a summer evening.” You’ll be able to see the color yellow, and light and shadow. It is the story of an aging man-who by this point was blind and thus dictated his writing to an assistant-reflecting on his life he tells his younger self what awaits him in the future, informing him, “When you reach my age, you’ll have almost totally lost your eyesight. The older Borges, the narrator, believes he is sitting on a bench by the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while the younger Borges is convinced he’s near the Rhone in Geneva, where Borges and his family were forced to live during World War I and where Borges attended school from 1914 to 1921. “The Other,” from The Book of Sand, describes an encounter Borges had in 1969 with his younger self.

In fact, the two stories are damn-near Doppelgängers of each other. In each of Jorge Luis Borges’s final story collections, The Book of Sand (1975) and Shakespeare’s Memory (1983), the great Argentine fabulist opens by returning to one of his favorite themes, the Doppelganger.

Borges selected non fictions