From a February 2, 1985, interview with Jorge Luis Borges, by Argentine poet and essayist Héctor Alvarez Castillo, included in Camino a Babel, self-published by Alvarez Castillo last year. Translated from the Spanish by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio.

Héctor Alvarez Castillo: A thinker you must find interesting is Heraclitus.

Jorge Luis Borges: Yes, he believed that everything is fire.

Alvarez Castillo: Everything is fire, and good and bad are one.

Borges: The path that goes up and the path that goes down. You get to know him best through his critics, right? I mean Aristotle and others.…