The publication of the Charles Eliot Norton lectures given by
Jorge Luis Borges at Harvard in 1967 is an unusual, as well as a
belated, event.
Those who heard him recall that, as a
public speaker, Borges was never an assured or dominating
presence, but he was still a strangely haunting and magnetic
figure on the stage. It must be remembered that he was educated
at home and had the most fragile contacts with the outside world
well into adulthood. A stutter from childhood, sometimes heard
even in his old age, complicated matters. There was always a
sense of hesitancy, even when he made his most rotund
affirmations. Sometimes this could lead to exasperation. The poet
Alastair Reid, during a public interview, said to his face,
“Borges, you use humility like a club!” Often, his sentences
would end with a querulous “no?”—as if asking for affirmation by
the hearer. And there was the matter of his Scottish burr,
learned in his Buenos Aires infancy from his Scots nanny.

In any case, understatement was the essence of his aesthetic
program—touching the hem of the garment, as Robert Frost once
put it.
Fragments, the minor genres
and authors, a line or a strophe here and there: these were all he
needed to weave his incantatory spell.
But Borges only gradually emerged from his shell, slowly becoming a
public figure first in Argentina and then in the world at large.
He started “working” at age thirty-seven as first assistant in a