Spinoza
Even in this half-light the Jew’s hands, as they grind the lenses, seem to glow, and the dying afternoon is fear and cold (each afternoon just like another). His hands, the paling hyacinth-blue air the ghetto walls shut in, seem hardly to be there for this impassive man, lost in that maze of light he dreams. Fame does not trouble him, that dreams’ reflection in the dream of yet another mirror, nor the fearful love of young women. Free from both myth and metaphor, he polishes an intractable lens: infinite Map of One who is all His stars.
Translated by Allen ProwleSpinoza - meaning Summary
A Lens for the Infinite
The poem imagines Baruch Spinoza at work grinding lenses in Amsterdam's Jewish quarter. Borges presents him as detached from fame, romance, and conventional religious imagery, absorbed instead in a philosophical vision of God and the universe. The final image makes the lens both a practical object and a way of conceiving reality: a precise, infinite map of a divine whole containing every star.
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