Dad introduced me to Borges’s short stories one night in Year 10 when I was looking for something interesting to read. He put a copy into my hands, and told me to read “The Library of Babel.” I read it with the dictionary beside me. I only sort of understood the thing. It was full of mathematical and scientific references that I wanted to discuss with Rachel, but she’d left by then. I decided it was about people needing the answers to the world, to the universe, and going mad trying to find them.
