Walter Kirn and the empty politics of defiance
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one afternoon in the mid-1980s, while on scholarship at the University of Oxford, Walter Kirn came upon a bulletin announcing that Jorge Luis Borges was visiting the campus and wished to meet students informally. Kirn, the future writer and critic, then in his early 20s and a recent Princeton graduate, glanced at his watch and realized that the event started in 10 minutes.
He hurried down to one of those little rooms where Oxford students drank sherry with their dons. Borges, bent over an old-fashioned cane, leaning on a nurse’s arm, with wraparound sunglasses to shield his blind eyes, walked in. To Kirn, Borges had until then existed wholly outside space and time, less a human being than a synonym for capital-L Literature, like Kafka or Cervantes. Now the famous writer offered the cowed students an icebreaker. “I have a game I like to play,” he said. “I like to edit, or revise, Shakespeare.” On long flights or when he was bored, he would take Shakespeare’s speeches and try to improve them. He gave an example of a line he’d adjusted from King Lear. “Isn’t it plainly much better?” Borges asked.