   the zahir (original spanish title: "el zahir") is a short story by the argentine writer and poet jorge luis borges. it is one of the stories in the book the aleph and other stories, first published in 1949, and revised by the author in 1974. ==plot summary== zahir is a person or an object that has the power to create an obsession in everyone who sees it, so that the affected person perceives less and less of reality and more and more of the zahir, at first only while asleep, then at all times. in the story borges plays himself as a man who, after paying for a drink, gets the zahir in his change. at the very beginning of the story borges describes it: a common twenty-centavo coin, with the year of minting of 1929 and knife marks scratching the letters n t and the figure 2. borges then tells the reader about a train of thought focused on famous coins throughout history and legend, and the fact that a coin symbolizes our free will, since it can be turned into anything. these feverish thoughts keep him awake for a while. the next day borges decides to lose the coin. he goes to a faraway neighborhood in buenos aires, while he carefully avoids looking at the street names and numbers, and manages to get rid of the zahir by paying for another drink in an anonymous bar. the writer is unable to forget the coin, which fills his dreams and (we are allowed to guess) his waking moments too. in the meantime, he tries to look for a cure to his obsession, and after some research he finds a book that explains his malady. in this book, the borges character reads that the zahir (or sometimes zaheer) is a piece of islamic folklore that dates back to the 17th century. a zahir is an object that traps everyone who so much as takes a look at it, even from afar, into an obsession that finally erases the rest of reality. in other times and places, a tiger has been a zahir, as well as an astrolabe, the bottom of a well, and a vein in a marble column in a mosque. according to the myth, everything on earth has the propensity to be a zahir, but "the almighty does not allow more than one thing at a time to be it, since one alone can seduce multitudes". borges tells us that soon he will be unable to perceive external reality, and he will have to be dressed and fed; b
1949_short_stories Short_stories_by_Jorge_Luis_Borges