{"id":141008,"date":"2019-11-20T09:00:31","date_gmt":"2019-11-20T14:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=141008"},"modified":"2019-11-19T17:16:11","modified_gmt":"2019-11-19T22:16:11","slug":"the-most-famous-coin-in-borges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/20\/the-most-famous-coin-in-borges\/","title":{"rendered":"The Most Famous Coin in Borges"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Jorge Luis Borges at his office, Argentine National Library, 1973<\/p><\/div>\n

Let me see if I can summarize this famous short story. I\u2019m going from memory.<\/p>\n

A guy\u2014Borges\u2014explains that the Zahir is a twenty-centavo coin. If you\u2019re like me, you think, Okay, that\u2019s what Argentines call that coin. Wrong. He goes on to explain that at other times in history the Zahir has been a vein in a piece of marble, a tiger, a brass astrolabe, and many other things. Now if you\u2019re like me, you don\u2019t know what he\u2019s talking about. Welcome to the characteristic Borges beginning: a long first paragraph you know you\u2019re only gonna understand upon a second or third reading.<\/p>\n

But to continue. A socialite woman, a model and fashionmonger, has suddenly died. Borges heaps a bunch of satirical prose upon her memory, and then admits he was in love with her. He goes to her wake. He looks at her dead face and has feelings. Then he leaves and wanders the street. On a lark, or rather out of perversity, he goes into a bar, orders a brandy, and gets \u201cthe Zahir\u201d in his change. He immediately starts philosophizing about coins. One coin is all coins, et cetera. He goes home and throws himself into bed.<\/p>\n

Next day, something really strange starts to set in. His mind keeps returning to the coin. He gets rid of the actual artifact by spending it, but his thoughts keep going back to it \u2026 And at this point, I think I\u2019ll interrupt the pr\u00e9cis to give you an image of the coin he\u2019s talking about.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

He describes the coin in the first sentence of the story in great detail:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
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En Buenos Aires el Zahir es una moneda com\u00fan, de veinte centavos; marcas de navajas o de cortaplumas rayan las letras N T y el n\u00famero 2; 1929 es la fecha grabada en el anverso.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n
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In Buenos Aires the Zahir is a common twenty-centavo coin into which a razor or letter opener has scratched the letters N T<\/i>\u00a0and the number\u00a02<\/i>; the date stamped on the face is 1929. \u2014Hurley translation<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n
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In Buenos Aires the Zahir is an ordinary coin worth twenty-centavos. The letters N T and the number 2 are scratched as if with a razor-blade or penknife; 1929 is the date on the obverse. \u2014Fitts translation<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n
\n

Now, the coin in the photograph above lacks the scratched \u201cN T\u201d and the \u201c2,\u201d but other than that, it\u2019s the very article. It cost me six or seven bucks off a Spanish website. I expected to pay more. I\u2019m naive and thought the coin\u2019s importance in this story would make it a precious thing, a collector\u2019s item. But no: it was and is a commonplace piece of monetary trash. Want one? Go online.<\/p>\n

Back to the summary: Borges has gotten rid of the coin, but he still has it on the brain. He has dreams about coins. He writes a story about coins. Then, somehow, he\u2019s prompted to study the lore and traditions and documents related to the Zahir. He learns that traditional Arab culture sustained a certain folk belief, namely that God allows, at any given historical moment, exactly one object on the earth to be a Zahir.\u00a0Whoever comes in contact with that object starts to think about it all the time, more and more, until the person thinks of absolutely nothing else<\/i>. To the rest of the world, the person eventually seems catatonic. At some point, though, the Zahir-object is destroyed or thrown into the sea, and the process begins again, somewhere else in the world.<\/p>\n

Borges, still narrating, hears of other people in Buenos Aires who have clearly come into contact with that maddening twenty-centavo coin. Somebody\u2019s chauffeur has been admitted into an insane asylum. Somebody else is doing nothing but babbling about the coin. Borges remarks, with stoic dignity, that he is already only a fragment of his old self, and expects to be obliterated altogether within a few months. (The dead woman from the beginning of the story has not been mentioned for a long time; in fact, she never comes up again.) He philosophizes that no one need pity him in the least, as he will not be suffering when his mind is thoroughly unified, brought to a laser focus on the meaningless coin. He reports he can already picture both sides of the Zahir at once. The last sentence of the story reads: Quiz\u00e1 detr\u00e1s de la moneda est\u00e9 Dios<\/i>\u00a0[\u201cPerhaps behind the coin I shall find God.\u201d]<\/p>\n

Even casual readers of Borges might note something curious in this minor piece, namely that it acts as a kind of seesaw opposite to the much more famous story \u201cThe Aleph.\u201d In \u201cThe Aleph,\u201d Borges looks at a single gleaming point (under a staircase in somebody\u2019s basement, or something) and is able to view everything in the universe at once. (Tiny dot reveals all<\/i>.) In \u201cThe Zahir\u201d (note the A-to-Z thing going on) the gleaming point\u00a0sucks in<\/i>\u00a0the universe. (Tiny dot takes everything away<\/i>.)<\/p>\n

I am far from the first person to point out the opposition of the two stories, and I am probably not the first to venture that the meaning of \u201cThe Zahir\u201d is bound up in a more-or-less hostile interrogation of religion and religiosity. Basically, if the ideal of the religious person is to live in constant mindfulness of God, to see God in all things, to resolve all difficulties in God, then isn\u2019t that as terrible as the clearly terrible situation of the Borges character at the end of the tale? Put it this way: if everything is One, then everything might as well be zero.<\/p>\n

Which brings me back to the \u201cN T 2\u201d that was scratched on the coin. One of Borges\u2019s favorite tricks was to twig Christianity by means of Islam and Buddhism and the other world religions. It\u2019s an old trick. Gibbon does it. Lots of people. What you do is handle the foreign religion with the same respectfulness and indulgence one is supposed to observe in handling Christianity, knowing full well that doing this will sound offbeat and slightly ironic. The hint starts to materialize that the religions all stand in need of this indulgence, because they are all equally quaint, and equally false. This is why Borges makes belief in the Zahir an emphatically Middle Eastern and Asiatic affair. His only hint that the perverse desire for homogenized nullity belongs just as much to Christianity as to the Eastern religions is that citation: \u201cN T 2.\u201d<\/p>\n

You see, \u201cN T\u201d means exactly the same thing in Spanish as it does in English: N<\/i>uevo\u00a0<\/i>T<\/i>estamento\u00a0<\/i>\/ New Testament. If you made a list (in either language) of meanings for the abbreviation NT, its use to mean \u201cNew Testament\u201d would dwarf all other usages combined. It\u2019s roughly equivalent to \u201cUSA\u201d for \u201cUnited States of America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Okay, but what about the \u201c2\u201d? Well, what\u2019s the second book of the New Testament? Only the oldest Gospel: Mark. And why should Borges specially single out Mark? Maybe because of this:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0 28 And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0 29 And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments\u00a0is<\/i>, Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0 30 And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this\u00a0is<\/i>\u00a0the first commandment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n
\n

Look, I don\u2019t know. Maybe there\u2019s a hundred miles of Spanish commentary on this short story, firmly establishing that \u201cN T 2\u201d stands for something completely different. I haven\u2019t seen those documents; I\u2019m just going toe-to-toe with the text like a normal person.<\/p>\n

Below is my twenty-three-year-old copy of an Argentine print of the story collection\u00a0The Aleph<\/i>. There are exactly fourteen footnotes in the whole book, each one of \u2019em put there by Borges himself. There\u2019s not one by a helpful person who is actually trying to explain anything.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At any rate, it must be admitted the story \u201cThe Zahir\u201d is not itself a Zahir. You, reader, are about to pass on to the rest of your day, untroubled by any of this. I, too, the moment I press SEND<\/small> on this piece, shall regard the matter as closed, though it obviously isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

It seems that for all of us, as for Borges, the topic of God actually does fit neatly underneath a twenty-centavo piece\u2014which happens to be the exact same size as an American nickel.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Anthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas. His second book is\u00a0<\/em>Try Never<\/a>. He is a correspondent for the\u00a0<\/em>Daily.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anthony Madrid does a deep dive into \u201cThe Zahir.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1005,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22700],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-correspondents"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Most Famous Coin in Borges by Anthony Madrid<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 20, 2019 \u2013 Anthony Madrid does a deep dive into \u201cThe Zahir.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/20\/the-most-famous-coin-in-borges\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta 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