Jorge Luis Borges’ story The Aleph can be seen as a metaphor for the crisis of cognition in a world that challenges experience, language, and the mind.
Kabul 24: The narrator, mourning the death of Beatriz, the woman he loved, is disturbed during her funeral by the sight of cigarette billboards around the city.
The fact that life goes on, indifferent to Beatriz’s death, torments him.Determined never to forget her, he visits her house every year on the anniversary of her death, now occupied only by Carlos Argentino, Beatriz’s cousin.
Carlos is a poet who crafts grandiose verses, filled with heavy words that aim to encompass the entire world—from Ottoman history to Australian nature—in a single image. Borges listens patiently, tinged with envy, to these poems, all to catch a glimpse of Beatriz’s black-and-white photos on the wall.Years pass until one day Carlos, in a panic, calls Borges to say the landlord plans to demolish the house to expand his shop.
Carlos’s main concern is that in the basement lies a point called “the Aleph”—a small sphere containing the entire world, every place, every time, every thing. Carlos reveals that his poetry draws inspiration from this Aleph, and if the house is destroyed, the Aleph will be lost.Curious yet skeptical, Borges visits the basement.
Carlos instructs him to lie down under the stairs and stare at the nineteenth step to see if the Aleph will reveal itself. When Borges does so, he sees it: an Iranian astrolabe, Beatriz’s love letters to Carlos, her decomposing body, even the dark flow of blood in his own veins—all within a tiny point, distinct yet unmingled.
The experience is so overwhelming that he cannot describe it, left grappling with a profound question: What was the Aleph?The Aleph, that small point beneath a forgotten staircase, contains everything: Beatriz’s corpse, the blood in veins, memory and imagination, tragedy and beauty.
But this “everything” exists not as data but as presence—a presence that language cannot capture and before which the mind surrenders. Encountering the Aleph is to face a timeless totality that defies narration or representation. This point shakes the core of language and human consciousness, revealing that understanding is rooted in living, not in reproducing meaning.Every philosophical question begins where one returns not to answers but to the possibility of questioning itself—a return to language, narrative, consciousness, and that lost point Borges calls “the Aleph.” A small, silent point beneath a forgotten staircase, yet containing the entire world.
Borges speaks of a point where all places, times, and things exist simultaneously and unmediated. The Aleph is a singularity that erases the boundaries between reality and representation, a minute absolute space encompassing the universe.
When the narrator encounters this singular point, he experiences a kind of perceptual vertigo: he cannot discern whether what he sees is real or a representation.This vertigo is mirrored in today’s digital world.
Confronted with manipulated algorithms and an information explosion, the human mind struggles to distinguish “reality” from “image,” much like encountering the Aleph—a representation of infinity in a single point that renders language powerless.
The narrator, attempting to describe the Aleph, grapples with the limits of language, ultimately admitting his inability to express it. This very failure becomes the most powerful narrative.In the contemporary world, we no longer live in one place, one time, or even one body. Our existence has become hybrid—a blend of presence and absence, of touching earth and drowning in data.
Our bodies may be in a locked room, on a street, in a subway, or a store, but our spirits wander in a boundless network. Our bodies are at home, our images in virtual meetings, our minds roaming through networks, messages, digital images, and sounds, lost in a thousand tabs, a thousand windows, a thousand codes.Our identity is re-forged in a digital lifeworld, brimming with physical, imaginative, and lived experiences, interwoven in a continuous, elusive stream.
We live across multiple worlds—neither purely “real” nor “virtual,” but something intertwined, where neither can be understood alone, nor can we clearly discern which is more real.
Mojgan Khalili
