-----Original Message-----
13 quoted lines
From: Dan <meliza at OCF.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2001 11:54:44 -0700 (PDT)
I don't know what the consensus is on the
ending of the novel, but I
took Weer's remark about waking, in the context
of the Chinese garden
dream, to mean either that he is at last waking
to a higher, more
realized existence (as in the Borges tale - I
forget the title - of
the man who dies and only after a series of
nightmares realizes that
he has in fact been in heaven all along)
This doesn't ring a bell with me, and I've read
Borges' collected stories (though it could have
just slipped my mind). The closest thing to it I can
think of is a story Borges took from Swedenborg
(it appeared in The Universal History of Infamy
and in the Borges co-edited Book of Fantasy, iirc),
which I'd mentioned on this list before. But in that
story the dead man is in hell, not heaven.
--Adam