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FEBRUARY 2008   * I’m outraged, but I’ve learned a way of reasoning that quickly defuses my exasperation This morning, a sudden rage when I see that Noam Cohen of the New York Times is re-inventing the wheel with the news that Borges, in his stories set in a pre-technological past, predicted the arrival of the internet I would not have been annoyed by such a fossilised ‘discovery’ on the part of the New York Times if it weren’t for the fact that the author of the piece, with ridiculous self-importance, dismisses Borges as an ‘Old-World librarian’ and ‘a fusty sort’, when in actual fact the man who is out of date is Cohen himself, more behind with the latest news than the cyclist Godot when he arrived behind time at each stage of the Tour   Writing – Roberto Bolaño said – is a rational, visionary activity, an exercise in intelligence and adventure From among the multiple adventures, readers of the visionary Borges will never forget the spiral staircase, which plunges down and soars up off into the remote distance in his memorable tale ‘The Library of Babel’ When this story was first published in 1941, few could have imagined that this staircase would end up turning Borges into a demiurge, a strange visionary who described the Internet before it existed   We have known for years now that Borges, in an exercise of intelligence and intellectual adventure, anticipated the World Wide Web in ‘The Library of Babel’, and also in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, another of his stories from that period: ‘Who, singular or plural, invented Tlön? The plural is, I suppose, inevitable, since the hypothesis of a single inventor — some infinite Leibniz working in obscurity and self-effacement — has been unanimously discarded It is conjectured that this ‘brave new world’ is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebrists, moralists, painters, geometers, guided and directed by some shadowy man of genius’   In his story, Borges tells us that in this secret society there is a great number of individuals skilled in the most varied disciplines,