Chapter 55 Reading Notes "Death Compass"--Reading Borges' Novels

There are two protagonists in the story "Death Compass".One is Lonnrot, who is always present. He is a brilliant pure reasoner. His reasoning excludes the world, is unconstrained, and belongs to the scope of belief or religion. Such reasoning is often not understood by ordinary people, such as the chief of police.Another feature of Lonnrot's reasoning is that he puts himself into playing a role until he finally dies for his faith.The other protagonist is Shalah, who doesn't appear until the end, who sets up the labyrinth for Lonnrot's reasoning.He is a master magician who can put secular emotions into practice in a religious sense. He is a bit like Lonnrot's teacher, inspiring him step by step to the highest level.For Sharah, the original intention of building the maze is deep-seated love and hatred, the impulse of revenge, but this kind of revenge has been transformed into artistic revenge. He does not want to kill his opponent, but to make his opponent understand "death" the true meaning ofFor Lonnrot, his original intention was to find out his own spiritual way out under the weight of original sin. With the keen intuition of a case-solver, he followed the route arranged by Shalah for him, reached the center of the labyrinth, and finally understood how to defy the law is the only reasoning result.The combination of these two people is the two levels of the soul. Lonnrot belongs to intuition, and Schalach belongs to rationality, but intuition also includes rationality, and rationality comes from intuition, presenting the beauty of ingenious symmetry.The two complement each other, and together they will unravel the mysteries of the mysterious existence.

The story begins with the introduction of Lonnrot.Lonnrot is at once a mere reasoner, an adventurer, and even a gambler (like the artist, he bets his life, since Schalach "must have Lonnrot's life").Lonnrot has a genius for foresight. From the very beginning, he speculated about the hidden nature of a series of crimes and the intervention of Shalah. That is to say, Lonnrot's sense of original guilt made him vaguely feel the final outcome.He failed to prevent crime, because crime is the arrangement of fate, but his unalterable gambler temperament made him determined to gamble with fate.His gambling method is the intervention of thinking and reasoning, and it is a layer-by-layer dissection of himself.

A rabbi has been killed, the chief of police is concerned with finding the murderer in the secular, and Lonnrot is concerned with the problem of the soul.He told the police chief: "Reality can be free from the obligation to be interesting, but one cannot help making assumptions. There are too many elements of chance in your assumptions. The deceased here was a Rabbi; I tend to explain it purely from the perspective of a Rabbi... ..." What Lonnrot means is that people have the right to fantasize and assume, which is the highest right bestowed by God, and death embodies God's will, which excludes secular explanations.The doctor's killing was Lonnrot's first death exercise, and it was here that he began to explore the will of God in depth.Murder then entered the second exercise, and the third exercise... Lonnrot's thoughts became more and more tense.The opponent quickly provided him with a compass and a compass, he learned the four-letter name of the god, and the principle of symmetry told him that the end was coming.Lonnrot cannot back down, his nature is to gamble, that is, to think to the end, without which he ceases to exist.Finally, he walked into the realm arranged by Scharacher for him, in that weird villa where every item was meaningless, "all roads lead to Rome", he experienced "nothing", and set off " What is "no" is the "being" of countless moments.

It seemed to him that the house was boundless and expanding.The house wasn't really that big, he thought.What makes it bigger are shadows, symmetry, mirrors, long years, my unfamiliarity, solitude. Finally the punishment began, and Lonnrot was tied up.He asked Shalah if he was looking for the name of God like him; he saw a complex expression of relief on Shalah's face, which was a human expression mixed with a god's expression.Shallah's answer reproduced the state of the unity of man and god from the limit.His words imply that what he is looking for is not simply the name of God, but more importantly, the name of man.He tactfully told Lonnrot that the name of God is actually derived from those "shorter and more fragile things", that is, from people's worldly deep-seated love and hatred (love for his brother and hatred for Lonnrot) of.Without the deep-seated hatred for Lonnrot, how could he, Shalah, have the idea of ​​building a maze around the enemy?Lonnrot let him experience the unbearable state of eternal life, and he wants to let him have the same experience, let him see death coming, let him struggle hopelessly between life and death.Schalach's labyrinth is ingenious, every step of punishment reflects the will of God, and also reflects the universality of art. It implies that those who walk towards death are those who want to explore God's will, and such people must use their bodies to To engage in the art of exploration is to make sacrifices.In the end, of course, it also implies that the so-called sacrifice is just an exercise (even if it is the final exercise).

Lonnrot avoided Shalah's gaze.He looked at the trees and the sky outside the hazy yellow, green, and red diamond-shaped glass windows.He felt a little cold, and an objective, almost nameless sadness.It was night, and a useless song of a bird rose from the gray garden. This is what it feels like to finally decipher the ultimate riddle.And yet he was thinking (how could he not?), he clearly imagined symmetrical patterns, periodic death.He was obsessed with obsession, and the more urgent he became, the more intoxicated he became. He kept imagining, and then he remembered a new maze form that was most suitable for his current situation, that is, the form of a linear Greek maze.What this form symbolizes is the accelerated arrival of death, and it is a mystery that the space is getting smaller and purer in a sense.He used this simplest maze to summarize Shalakh's maze, and expressed his final feelings.Shallah made a promise to him that the next time he killed him, he would arrange for him that kind of "one-line, invisible, never-ending maze".

The original sin of Lonnrot is the original sin of man. If a man has the courage of a gambler like Lonnrot, he can split a Sharah from himself to judge himself.Scharlach's ruthlessness is transformed by the love and hatred of original sin, which is the quality that always attracts Lonnrot to take on him.For as long as there have been artists in the world, Schallach has been constantly changing, finding an outlet for the impulse in people, leading them to immortality.