Borges + Poe = Existential Terror in the Basement

DO NOT GO DOWN THERE UNLESS YOU WANNA LOSE YOUR MIND

The Cask of Amontillado + The Aleph = Don’t blindly trust everybody who offers you free cognac!

(And this week I have only 7 charts for you, but I think they illustrate the linkage I’ve been pondering this week.)

Two of my favorite short stories eerily echo each other in tone and terror. They both leave you with a sense of guilt and dread. And both of them are about haughty dudes who secretly hate each other.

They both help you spot frenemies and describe how the dangerously jealous behave. A truly fearsome takeaway from both tales: Are you SO annoying that somebody wants to ruin your life? PROBABLY!

Both are short enough to read back-to-back, too (which I did thanks to the accidental magic of having way too many tabs open at once), and then realized they were literary siblings of different fathers.

And if you consider the Aleph itself (as the object in the story, not the story itself), then Borges saw Fortunato all rotted out in his bricked-up tomb.

I like that idea very much—it shows that Borges built his story on all the things he’d seen and read before, and one of them just might have been Poe’s tale of basement-centered revenge.

Stay safe out there: beware snotty dudes offering booze. Whatever they say will never be able to fully express everything they’re feeling—which is pretty much the gist of The Aleph, and the warning of The Cask of Amontillado.