infinite libraries and knife fights

The author dreams he meets his older self in a hotel room, near death, who tells him he is the one dreaming the younger -
There was a silence, and then he said to me:
"Let's try a test. What was the most terrible moment of our life?"
I leaned over him and the two of us spoke at once. I know that neither of us spoke the truth.

Quiet and thrilling, from a story hardly 5 pages in length. Later in the same story (August 25, 1983), Borges summarizes his themes and mocks himself for me:

".....My good intentions hadn't lasted beyond the first pages; those that followed held the labyrinths, the knives, the man who thinks he's an image, the reflection that thinks it's real, the tiger that stalks in the night, the battles that are in one's blood, the blind and fatal Juan Murana, the voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the ship made with the fingernails of the dead, Old English repeated in the evening."
"That museum rings a bell," I remarked sarcastically.
"Not to mention false recollections, the doubleness of symbols, the long catalogs, the skilled handling of prosaic reality, the imperfect symmetries that critics so jubilantly discover, the not always apocryphal quotations."

Borges' stories are elegant and succinct, more poetry than prose. It's great to discover an author who's influenced everyone else you've ever read (Philip K Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Pynchon, John Fowles, Grant Morrison, Jesus, etc.) Also Wikipedia's magical realism entry lists Garcia Marquez..........so Oprah's book club or not, I'll be grabbing One Hundred Years of Solitude finally.