There are stories you like and stories you don’t like, but it isn’t until you teach a story that you can really love or loathe it. I discovered this when teaching a course in Magical Realist Fiction, where Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” went on the nice-story-but-I-don’t-ever-need-to-read-this-again list and Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Aleph” was catapulted to my personal all-time top five canon.

The protagonist of “The Aleph” (who we will later learn, in an almost nonchalant afterthought, is named Borges too) mourns the death of his unrequited love Beatriz, forging a reluctant relationship with her cousin, Danieri. Both are writers; Danieri a hack: “He dealt in pointless analogies and in trivial scruples…. Danieri’s real work lay not in the poetry but in the invention of reasons why the poetry should be admired” while the reader assumes the first person narrator’s erudition indicates his superior literary skills. Danieri then shows Borges his secret muse, the Aleph, viewed through a hole in his basement stairs, “the only place on earth where all places are—seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending.”

Borges the author/narrator, unlike his self-aggrandizing frenemy Danieri, starts describing this experience by first claiming that it is out of the reach of description. ” And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass?”

I was seven years old in 1973 when my parents received a grant to start an alternative school in Philadelphia. We lived in a cozy fieldstone cottage in Mount Airy, with my uncle Jeff and the remaining hippies from a small commune Jeff had formed in Colorado. My father, who had been the star of the University of Pennsylvania football team during its few promising years, was well liked around the city. But he couldn’t believe his good fortune when a near-stranger named Woodward, who owned many properties in North Philadelphia, handed him the keys to a vacant house a few blocks from ours, and said, as long as you’re starting a school, you’re going to need a schoolhouse. Rent-free for a year, renewable thereafter. With help from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, my father named the school “Our House,” as in “Our House is a Very, Very, Very Fine House.” He advertised in the community papers, posted flyers around local schools, and by the end of summer nearly a hundred students had enrolled.