It rereads very well, unsurprisingly; Borges' ideas aren't compelling because of novelty, or surprise endings, but simply in their own intrinsic selves. It's as mindboggling as it was the first time around.
One of the most compelling stories- for a book-lover like myself- is "The Library of Babel." The Library of the title is a seemingly-infinite series of rooms, each filled with shelves, each shelf filled with books. Each book is 410 pages long, and contains a random arrangement of letters, commas, periods, and spaces.
Of course, this means that almost all the books are pure gibberish. But the implication is made that the library is a complete collection- every possible combination of letters is there, somewhere. So all of Shakespeare is there, as are the collected works of Plato, or the printed form of Warp and Wolf- you just have to find them.
It is a fantasy that appeals very much to my book-greed.
But further along, I came upon Borges' essay "A Note on (toward) George Bernard Shaw." And here he says:
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is. A book is not an isolated being; it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships... If literature were nothing more than verbal algebra, anyone could produce any book by essaying variations.
Suddenly, my whole understanding of The Library of Babel turned upside down, and I realized: it is a library of soulless books. The whole point of writing- of art in general- is for one human being to communicate a feeling or insight to another, and there is no author for the Library's books. They're just the mechanical iteration of every possible combination of letters.
At this point (Warning! The geek quotient of this post is about rise) I remembered another near-infinite library, the one run by Lucien in Neil Gaiman's Sandman. The premise of Lucien's library is that it not only contains normal books, it also contains books that authors have dreamed of writing. (The only one that I can remember offhand was C.S. Lewis' The Emperor Over the Sea, an eighth Narnia book. But Gaiman showed us many examples.)
The appeal of Lucien's library is the idea that authors had a chance, if only in dreams, to write the perfect books they wished for (and we wish to read.) It is a dream of a consummated literary relationship; the books have meaning precisely because of their authors.
And that is the difference in the two. Dream's world is all about meaning- all the human understandings and implications we bring to life inside our heads, in our stories. It is both free and ambiguous because of this.
His older brother is Destiny, and he is Dream's polar opposite- his world is all about irrevocability, undeniable fact, immutable causalty. It's the world of things which must be what they are. And Borges' library fits there perfectly: its only meaning is in its necessary completeness, which has no relevance to any human need or creative act.
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