Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes, His Memory" (1942)

      Borges begins his narrative by acquainting us with the unusual world that Funes perceives. He describes Funes capability of perception as admired by some and enjoyed by Funes himself, and emphasizes his swiftness at learning any language and perceive everything in detail, contrasting it with our constant procrastination and general feeling that we are immortal and thus we ought not now everything or do everything. We could then say that Funes lives each day at the maximum of his cognitive capabilities.

      On the other hand Borges makes us appreciate the importance of reason and thought regarding any kind of experience. Through his description of Funes’s condition we can discern that the real value of experience is not every single detail of it, but our capability of abstractraction. Transforming experiences into meaningful pieces of information allows us to give a logical structure to our lives and interact with the world using reason. At this point we are able to observe that Funes is trapped in a continuous flow of stimuli, without any structure, that consumes him as time advances.

      Finally it’s strange to see that in the original reading the title is “Funes el memorioso” meaning that Funes had very good memory, but ironically all he remembered wasn’t something we would normally classify as “memories” since they didn’t involve any interpretation of the experiences.