The Zahir
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The Zahir (in the original Spanish, El Zahir) is a short story by famous Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It is one of the stories in the book "The Aleph", first published in 1949, and revised by the author in 1974.
In the story, the Zahir is an object that has the power to create an obsession in everyone who sees it, so that the affected person perceives less and less of reality and more and more of the Zahir, at first only while asleep, then at all times. (This story is an example of the motif of harmful sensation.)
Borges plays himself in the story as a man who, after paying for a drink, gets the Zahir in his change. At the very beginning of the story Borges describes it: a common twenty-centavo coin, with the date of 1929 and knife marks with the letters N T and the figure 2.
Borges then tells the reader about a train of thought focused on famous coins throughout history and legend, and the fact that a coin symbolizes our free will, since it can be turned into anything. These feverish thoughts keep him awake for a while. The next day Borges decides to lose the coin. He goes to a faraway neighborhood in Buenos Aires, while he carefully avoids looking at the street names and numbers, and manages to get rid of the Zahir by paying for another drink in an anonymous bar.
The writer is unable to forget the coin, which fills his dreams and (we are allowed to guess) his waking moments too. In the meantime, he tries to look for a cure to his obsession, and after some research he finds a book that explains his malady.
The Zahir is an Islamic myth that dates back to the 17th century. A Zahir is an object that traps everyone who so much as takes a look at it, even from afar, into an obsession that finally erases the rest of reality. In other times and places, a tiger has been Zahir, as well as an astrolabe, the bottom of a well, and a vein of marble in a column of a mosque. According to the myth, everything on earth has the propensity to be a Zahir, but "the Almighty does not allow more than one thing at a time to be it, since one alone can seduce multitudes".
Borges tells us that soon he will be unable to perceive external reality, and he will have to be dressed and fed; but then he reflects that this fate does not worry him, since he'll be oblivious to it. In idealistic philosophy, "to live and to dream are synonymous", and he will simply pass "from a very complex dream to a very simple dream". In a mixture of despair and resignation, he wonders:
- "Others will dream that I am mad, and I [will dream] of the Zahir. When all men on earth think day and night of the Zahir, which one will be a dream and which a reality, the earth or the Zahir?"