Borges wrote this in 1960 in Poem of the Gifts, shortly after being appointed director of the National Library of Argentina. The appointment coincided, with a cruelty Borges found almost literary, with the final stage of the blindness he had been losing his sight to for decades. He could no longer read the books he now presided over. The line about paradise was written inside that specific pain.

The quote has since become the motto of every bookish introvert, printed on tote bags and coffee mugs, flattened into a compliment paid to libraries. The original weight is darker. Borges was not saying libraries are nice. He was saying that if heaven exists, it will have to look like the one earthly thing that has ever come close, and it will have to let him read again. The tenderness is in the bargaining.

A cat wedged between two volumes on a bookshelf, asleep with a paw across the spine of a paperback it will never read, is living inside this paradise without earning it. No grief. No bargaining. Just warm wood, the smell of old paper, and the pleasant, dense company of books that will not interrupt. Most of our own best hours in a library are some version of that pose. Borges, blind, envied it as much as anyone.