# Ultan, borges *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 02 Feb 2005* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Maru Dubshinki *02 Feb 2005, 19:30* I know that Ultan, the blind librarian of New sun, is related to Borges all too clearly, and that his haunting speech is something Borges himself might well have written, if he dared to write something so unobfuscatedly autobiographically. But the style is not Borges, nor Wolfe's, in my humble opinion. Recently, re-reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, about half-way through is a chapter which is a litany of strange, but beautiful things Gray devoted himself to as an aesthete, and those listings and comments all strike me inescapably as being of the same vein as Ultan, though it did not occur to me recently, despite both passages lingering long in my mind. Furthermore, I was told that part of teh reason 'Gray' was a flawed masterpiece was Wilde's resorts to French 'Symbolistes' games in the middle of the book. I think it was referring to those chapters which so impressed me in 'Gray', and by extension of Wolfe's. Unfortunately, I know nothing of the French Symbolistes, and Internets searches reveal too little. Can anyone here trace that passage's essence beyond a Catholic orphan, a blind Argentinian, and a debauched Englishman? ~Maru Microsoft delenda est. ---