It’s hard to pick a favorite short story from Jorge Luis Borges’ collection, but if I had to, I’d pick this one: “Funes, His Memory.”

Borges was an Argentinian writer who wrote his most popular works, including “Funes,” in the 1940s. His stories follow similar tropes of South American magical realism, but few can say they write like Borges. He writes short stories in the style of documentaries, only that they concern impossible subjects, usually regarding the concept of infinity. If you happened to read my short story “Kicks,” well, I stole some of his flow. Borges breaks the classic advice of “show, don’t tell” and just tells you. It’s just exposition. And somehow it works.

Anyway, I just want to start talking about this story, so here goes. It begins with another faceless narrator going in-depth on topics that seem trivial on the first read, and then maybe still trivial by the second read. When you reread Borges, though, you can always tell where he’s going. The first read is a slow burn.

Anyway x2. The narrator describes miscellaneous details regarding a young, Uruguayan boy named Ireneo Funes, whom he only interacted with on three occasions, silently communicating the strong impression this boy made on the narrator (sometimes telling is showing). The narrator first meets Ireneo when he can still walk and run. They don’t really talk, the narrator sees him and describes him as brash but sharp kid. And then Ireneo gets bucked off a horse. He becomes paralyzed and lives his life in the darkness of his room. The second interaction occurs when Ireneo asks the narrator, a scholar, for some books, which the narrator brings to his room. When they meet again, Borges finally reveals the impossible premise of the short story:

Ireneo Funes retains all of his memories.

Italicizing “all” doesn’t do it justice. Borges details how Ireneo not only memorizes and is able to recite the books the narrator brought him, but is able to reconstruct entire days that he lived in his mind like a jigsaw puzzle. Not only does Ireneo remember the shape of a cloud from years ago, but each shape at every particular moment. A normal person perceives a glass of wine on a table; Ireneo perceives every grape crushed, the harvested stalks, everything that led up to the creation of that wine, everything, all of it.

Reading this made me appreciate the endless complexity and detail of the most ordinary things. When I stare into space, in the direction of my wall, I’m actually looking at the white paint bubbles, the wood & metal underneath, hard work of builders & designs of engineers, and at atomic particles of air between them. It’s awe inspiring just how much detail exists in everything.

Yet Borges, after all this, has the narrator deliver a gem of a line. He says that Ireneo must not have been very good at thinking. Wait, isn’t Ireneo a brainiac? How can someone like Ireneo be bad at thinking?

Borges shows us why by telling, again. Ireneo spends his days coming up with a numerical system in which every number has a specific name. So, the new name for 9 is “five hundred” or the number 7,013 is called “Maximo Perez.” Also, the narrator mentions one of Locke’s ideas about a system where every particular person, place, or thing has a unique name. But Ireneo says that’d be “too general” and starts creating unique names for every thing in every point in time. The same dog at 3:13 pm and 3:14 pm would have two separate names. Get it? It’s all useless. All that information is pointless, tedious, and means nothing.

And earlier on, Ireneo says his memory is “a garbage dump.” Ireneo doesn’t have a gift, he has a curse.

Borges places Ireneo in the darkness of his room, so that the narrator can’t see his face. It’s like Ireneo has lost his humanity. He’s a faceless voice that provides you with nearly endless knowledge without understand what any of it means.

Does Ireneo sound like anything you know? Something that records all data, can access that data instantly, yet does not have a rational mind? Ireneo Funes is the Internet. Borges predicted the nature of the internet in the 1940s.

(Actually, he predicted it TWICE. He wrote another short story titled “The Library of Babel” which I want to write about another time.)

Ireneo is less a functioning brain but a library, a database of information. He records all data, no matter how trite, with complete equality. The internet is the same: Hamlet is preserved as well as Twilight fanfictions; the work of astrophysicists and brainrot memes are both just links at the end of the day, just lines of code. The internet does not know the difference in quality between groundbreaking medical discoveries and the most recent thing Trump said. When brilliant, worthwhile information is considered equal to useless, depressing content are all equal, the things that rise to the top are the things that hog your attention. But that’s more a problem of capitalism, and I don’t want to talk about capitalism right now.

This is the genius of Borges, in my mind. He completely reconstructed the way I think about thinking. I used to define “thinking” as an act of expanding, but really, the act of thinking is about limiting. The phrase “narrowing it down” helps me understand this point. Thinking is discrimination. The problem with the internet, the difference between AI and humans, is a lack of discrimination. Out of context, that sounds like I’m advocating for racism because of the connotation “discrimination” carries. You, reader, can use context and your brain to understand my point easily. But the Internet and Ireneo Funes cannot.

Most of all, Borges touches on the value of forgetting things. So often I find myself scolding my bad memory, or forgetting anything. But if I didn’t forget my keys, not even once, would I have enough space for the important stuff? Every Wi Fi password would become as integral to Anthony Sharkey as my most potent memories. By recording everything I would become no one.

I could go on and on about this story and Borges, especially when it comes to our situation in 2025. I just want to leave with this: the story of Funes is tragic. Again, Borges cleverly places Ireneo in the dark so that the narrator can’t see his face, like he’s not a person anymore. Ireneo’s ability has come at the cost of his personhood. His seemingly endless registry of knowledge is not a superpower. Knowledge is power, they say, and it’s not nothing. But alone, knowledge and memory are useless. They show you the roads but they cannot pick for you.