Borges argues that death is what makes human life "precious and pathetic". In the story, the characters eventually search for a second river to undo their immortality, proving that a finite life is more desirable than an infinite one.
So here is the secret Borges leaves us:
To delve into the "deep content" of Borges is to enter a labyrinth where the walls are made of mirrors, and the center is not a monster, but a paradox. Here are the central pillars of his philosophical architecture.
His deep content suggests that we are trapped not by walls, but by the infinite possibilities of choice and the inevitability of consequence. The labyrinth is the image of the universe, and the Minotaur is perhaps ourselves.
In his story “The Immortal” (from The Aleph ), Borges tells of a Roman soldier who drinks from a cursed river and stops dying. He wanders the earth for centuries, forgetting his own name, living among primitive troglodytes — only to realize, eventually, that those grunting creatures are the immortals. They have no need for language, for memory, for love. Why write a poem when you have forever to write all poems? Why love one person when you can outlast every face?
Here lies the deep tragedy of Borges: the tension between the infinite universe and the finite human mind (and language). Language is a map, but the territory is infinite. We try to name the unnameable, but words are merely symbols of symbols. In The Library of Babel , humanity is lost in a library containing every possible book. Because it contains every combination of letters, it contains all truth, but also all falsehood. The library is a metaphor for the universe: it is total, yet meaningless without a reader to interpret it. Deep content, for Borges, is the realization that the universe may be a chaotic text that we are desperately trying to edit into coherence.