For every language there is a frontier, the crossing of which is strictly prohibited by that language’s implicit set of injunctions, yet the frontier is frequently crossed. Such an act of crossing entails a paradox. On the one hand, language’s very existence is predicated on the impossibility of saying everything (the existence of grammar implies the existence of nongrammar, consequently, there is an implied exclusion: “This cannot be said”). On the other hand, there is nothing that cannot be said—that is, nothing need necessarily be left unsaid, for there is hardly a rule one does not eventually break, either intentionally or unknowingly. In another manner of speaking, there are no explicit rules for what can be said outside the rules (i.e., you cannot speak about what cannot be said, at most you might be able to say it, otherwise you are consigned to silence; but if it is said, then some implied rule, or nonrule as it were, has been broken). Borges is, as to an extent we all are, trapped within such a quandary: to describe the ineffable Aleph, Tzinacan’s effort in “The God’s Script” to narrate his mystical experience, to discover the key to Ts’ui Pen’s labyrinthine book, Averroes’s problem in understanding Aristotle’s Poetics, whether or not the Library possesses any sort of order, and so on. — Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics by Floyd Merrell