Space and time, as Kant wrote, are the necessary forms taken by our intuition of an otherwise chaotic influx of sensory data. This explains why Borges’s next step was to unpack Kant’s first antinomy, the problem of whether the universe has a beginning in time or an edge in space. For, as Kant showed, if we conceive of the universe as if it were an object in time and space, we run headfirst into an impossible contradiction. When we imagine it being finite, we come to its edge in time or in space. But that edge must be somewhere, and hence we are forced to imagine something beyond it. However,
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