On Christmas Eve of 1938, bereft after the recent loss of his father, which had thrust him into a creative crisis, Jorge Luis Borges walked aimlessly into a window frame that jawed a large piece of flesh from his head. The wound quickly became infected, giving way to a bout of septicemia that he narrowly escaped. As he recovered from his brush with death in a fevered paranoia, Borges became convinced that the spotless window had damaged his brain irreversibly; that he’d permanently lost his ability to speak, reduced now to communicating in wordless grunts; and that he was to become insane forever after.
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