A few lines from Borges’ “The Shape of the Sword,” quoted below, have an eerily similar quality to a recently cited line from Midnight’s Children:
“Whatsoever one man does, it is as though all men did it. That is why it is not unfair that a single act of disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; that is why it is not unfair that a single Jew’s crucifixion should be enough to save it. Schopenhauer may have been right-I am other men, any man is all men, Shakespeare is somehow the wretched John Vincent Moon.” (pg. 141, Collected Fictions, from Viking)
Both writers have the ability to take in the whole world in a few words.
