Manguel on Borges:

It isn’t impossible that in some way, in order to be with a woman, any woman of the many he desired, to be privy to her mystery, to be more than just a wordsmith, to be or to try to be a lover and be loved for his own sake and not for that of his inventions, Borges created the Aleph, again and again, throughout his work.

But I’d go further. I suspect that Dante constructed literature’s best book in order to insert a few meetings with the unrecapturable Beatrice …