ch is now the future that awaits you?” (Borges 413).
We see the narrator dealing with local realities but preoccupied by universal conceptions. For all we know, he is imagining his younger self and carrying on the dialogue with himself. Nonetheless, this vague, blurred, dream-like perception of reality, an almost magical quality, is repeated in many of the stories in this collection as we shall see. We also see in this story Borges’ belief that life is experienced through reason and the senses. When he is talking of literature with his younger self, he explains “My alter ego believed in the imagination, in creation—in the discovery of new metaphors; I myself believed in those that correspond to close and widely acknowledged likenesses, those our imagination has already accepted: old age and death, dreams and life, the flow of time and water. I informed the young man of this opinion, which he himself was to express in a book, years later” (Borges 415). Time, space, mind and self are all interwoven to Borges, often unveiled to us in dream-like states where our perceptions and memories play a vital role in trying to make order of the present reality and self. Thus, to close out The Other, the narrator explains why his younger self will have a different memory of the encounter than his older self does—an encounter he was not even sure was real “I believe I have discovered the key to it. The encounter was real, but the other man spoke to me in a dream, which was why he could forget me; I spoke to him while I was awake, and so I am still tormented by the memory. The other man dreamed me, but did not dream me rigorously—he dreamed, I now realize, the impossible date on that dollar bill” (Borges 417).
Quite a few times, we see a positive relationship between a man and a woman in Borges’ stories within The Book of Sand. One such in particular is Ulrikke. The story builds to an encounter in a hotel room be...