The Alphabet at the Edge of Being
inspired by Borges’s “The Aleph”
There comes a point—somewhere between silence and the unsayable—where language trembles. It is there that we find Borges, staring into the Aleph, trying to describe what cannot be described. He confesses his failure with dignity: “All language is an alphabet of symbols whose use presupposes a past that the interlocutors share.” He doesn’t just say he’s speechless. He explains why—because words, by nature, are sequential. But life is not.
In The Aleph, Borges encounters something immense: a single point that contains all points. He sees everything—every face, every war, every kiss, every death—at once. But the moment he opens his mouth, the simultaneity fractures. He has to translate the infinite into sentences. One. After. Another. And that, perhaps, is what it means to be human.
We are linear creatures living in a world of overwhelming simultaneity. Everything happens at once, but we can only express it one word at a time. And so we tell stories. We write songs. We pray. We argue. We reach into the haze and try to shape it into meaning, not with our hands, but with our tongues.
This is why language matters so much—not because it’s perfect, but because it’s the best lie we have for truth. It’s how we give shape to the formless. Love, grief, awe, memory—these are impossible things. But we build them a scaffold of syllables and pretend it holds.
And it almost does.
Take Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It means nothing, sounds like silence, and yet is the beginning of every sacred utterance. Aleph is paradox: empty and full, silent and initiating, breathless and alive. In Kabbalistic tradition, it’s the doorway through which creation begins—a letter so humble it has no sound of its own, yet essential to every sound that follows.
This is the tension of language. It’s all scaffolding and no building. It’s not the cathedral—it’s the blueprints. It’s not the feeling—it’s the form it’s been squeezed into. And yet we keep speaking. Not because we believe language is truth, but because it’s the only road we have that leads toward it.
To live is to brush up against the ineffable every day. We see things we can’t explain. We feel things no sentence can hold. And still we try. A child stammers “I love you.” A mourner says “she’s gone.” A poet murmurs “this too will pass.” And though the words fall short, they reach. They reach because that’s what words do—they stretch toward meaning, even when they fail to touch it.
Language is the edge of the self. Not because it defines us, but because it marks the border of what we can define. Beyond it lies intuition, music, gesture, silence. But language is the gate. And Aleph—silent, breathlike—is its threshold.
So we speak. We write. We whisper. Not to capture the infinite, but to admit we’ve seen it—and to leave a mark that says we tried.