Jorge Luis Borges imagined a universal library containing every possible book, a garden of forking paths where every possible outcome exists simultaneously, and an encyclopedia that rewrites itself — decades before the internet, hypertext, or Wikipedia existed. He wrote these visions while going progressively blind, eventually losing his sight entirely while serving as director of Argentina’s National Library.

This episode traces Borges from his bookish Buenos Aires childhood through his revolutionary short fiction, his blindness, and the philosophical labyrinths that made him the most prophetic literary mind of the twentieth century.

• Borges’s childhood immersion in his father’s library and the literary obsession it created
• The short stories — “The Library of Babel,” “The Garden of Forking Paths” — that anticipated the digital age
• His progressive blindness and the cruel irony of being named National Library director as he lost his sight
• Why Silicon Valley engineers, physicists, and philosophers consider Borges a prophet