Borges, drawing the world

"A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face."

Yes, we built up our reality, and we do so with all objects, physical or spiritual, we come across and which we personally process. Borges is truly a literature of thoughts, smart speculations with an aesthetic taste and a flavor of truth, unconceivably more than in any other writer. The amount of insights that we can find in any single borgesian page is simply astonishing. He famously stated that 

"Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary."

In a material sense, Borges did not write much, he was not a very "prolific" author. The number of pages he left behind was not huge. He did not manage to write a novel, assuming he ever attempted to. Only short stories and essays (with the line between the two blurred). But if we consider his richness, the complex fascinating ideas with which he constantly filled his texts (to such an extent that full volumes could be forged out of many a single of his ideas!), then Borges is among the most "prolific" authors to ever have existed. A spiritual giant. A vast author, where it is possible to dissolve oneself in a sea of infinitude. 

He also reinvented a language, reverting a literary tradition. The language of Castile which one would have told only valid for an arid realism, was after him turned into a splendid key to a great intellectual universe. And those colorful supernatural realms of contemporary Latin American literature would be unthinkable without Borges. In some way, they all sprang out of him.