Circular Ruins was what got me hooked originally on Borges, though I didnt know too much what to take of it.
rereading now, immediate impressions are that it functions as an allegory for the artist. the struggle to form the symbiotic relationship between man and work, to make yourself a medium for the word, to navigate that near paradox of creating something without it being contrived.
The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though it was supernatural. He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality. This magical project had exhausted the entire content of his soul; if someone had asked him his own name or any trait of his previous life, he would not have been able to answer.
The magicians weary life after he releases his dreamed son reminds me of The Recognitions- 'What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology'
The final line strikes me as autobiographical: "With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another." Borges sounds more resigned to this when he repeats the sentiment in a 1981 interview: “I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”