"From the grillwork to the page," this is Borges at his best describing for you your own prison which you have imprisoned your self in by even contemplating the reading of Borges. What has even brought you to Borges; the keeper of the keys. Did others speak of him? Did Poe or Doyle inspire others to talk of him? Were other people throughout history contemplating the very prisons which Borges writes about?? Is life a prison from which the only escape is inevitable death and the existential, absurd plodding through a hellishly brilliant trap which is death itself with no hope for escape...
"The other one..." Here, Borges begins this piece by separating you the reader from he as the creator of your prison and as the one things "happen to." "Perhaps mechanically now" is Borges realization that in our world of forking paths there is only one choice and always with only one choice and one result there is no freedom. Freedom is an illusion and this is a fact. We are, in this sentence looking at an "entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate" and here you are left contemplating your entrance into Borges', life's, or God's prison because here Borges is just a professor in a list of professors. Suddenly, Borges gives you the keys, you become God or a professor of life or a potential prisoner contemplating your entrance into or escape from this prison or potential prison called life.
He then states the former things he likes to indulge in; "hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee {here he is challenging God; Kabbalistically El Aleph as a man, but God as a Universe; to blacken [like coffee] the bright celestial and solar sky, but I will not get into who the man is or why the challenge in this whole work is to me as well as God and why I have been contemplating suicide and why God and all people are challenging me to do it. I know Mary here (with red hair) and Borges knows my circumstances. It appears to be truly a paradox, but is there ever a paradox??}, and the prose of Stevenson." "But in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor" describes, not Borges' vanity, but is another challenge to the reader to not be vain. At the same time he is saying that vanity is inescapable within the next sentence because ours is not a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. He is also putting words into your mouth in his own vanity. Here you may accept his words by living or reject them by dying.
"It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to language and to tradition. Here Borges has made an ethical mistake and a vain one. The only option he had to save our statement from vanity was the word 'perhaps." Here the prison of death is given, perhaps, an option.
Then he says for us {even God} we are destined to perish and only some instant of ourselves can survive in Borges. Here the reader {or readers} are brought philosophically into the idea that even in a perishable death chamber where everything is eventually extinct, we survive, but as humans with a finite existence, the memory of us only survives the longest time if we have gained notoriety similarly to the way he has through memorable acts or some other kind of captured form. Then he makes his statement that the human reader is giving everything over to him little by little even though {and you can realize here that by including God as a participant I have falsified Borges} in his perversity he falsifies and magnifies things.
"Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger." Optional existence here, the longing to persist. Then Borges states that the reader will remain in Borges, not in himself {because death stalks you in his works}. (If it is true that I am someone), the challenge and personal insult is to someone who is no one unless they kill themselves for a potentially purposeless or purposeful cause. This also is a direct challenge to myself from Borges or Christ {lose your life and save it or save your life and lose it}, "but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others {including Kabbalah} or in the laborious strumming of a guitar." The monotonous movement of the astrological life machine we live in is real, physical, stellar, and this brings us back to the garden of forking paths where suicide for a cause becomes the only reality. "Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things." Freedom from death or suicide?? Time, infinity belong to the man with the suicidal challenge {Scharlach? Borges? God through these?}.
And yet what belongs to myself. Borges is very Christian here.