A lovely tale …

… That Time I Chauffeured Jorge Luis Borges Around Scotland. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

One day Borges arrived, a frail man in his seventies, blind, and wildly talkative. He appeared to have memorized the whole of western literature, quoting vast stretches of poetry by heart. I listened to him recite bits and pieces from Anglo-Saxon poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, Chesterton, Kipling, Stevenson, and Yeats, among others. “My grandmother was English,” he told me, as if to explain his virtuosity, “and English was my first language, my first love.”