The main character in “The Wrecker,” Loudon Dodd, is a wealthy, untalented, unglamorous and highly likable young American man who cares nothing for his unearned money and longs for the life of an artist. Dodd goes to Paris to become a sculptor, fails at that, abruptly loses all his money, becomes involved in a series of wild business adventures through his charismatic friend Pinkerton, and eventually finds himself entangled in a maritime adventure involving opium trading, bunk stocks, debt and deception. All this adventure, it is almost explicitly said, eventually makes of him a kind of artist, or at least his life a kind of work of art, if a very pulpy one.

So why did Borges read and reread “The Wrecker”? What was it that he believed every detail of? And how was his own writing a way of reading Stevenson’s sacredly profane text? Borges’s readerly attention re-invents Stevenson, just as his writerly attention created those vast unwritten books that Borges chose not to write, but just to imagine and comment on.

Dodd and the other characters often marvel at how their lives have become as full of surprise and drama as a dime novel, and this is, basically, a happy thing. It’s as if to say that here, finally, are circumstances that do justice to the scope and scale of my emotions. It’s the idea of the objective correlative, done extra boyishly. In “The Wrecker,” the hyperbolized material world measures up to the outsize passions of the heart.

Think of it this way: there is a vast unwritten book that the heart reacts to, that it races and skips in response to, that it believes in. But it’s the heart’s belief in that vast unwritten book that brought the book into existence; what appears to be exclusively a response (the heart responding to the book) is, in fact, also a conjuring (the heart inventing the book to which it so desperately wishes to respond).

In his work, Borges achieves a related effect, by different means. Stories like “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” and “The Book of Sand” refer to epic plots, but it’s the ideas and erudition, more than the action, that are colossal. Time, eternity, infinity and dreams — these are the only subjects commensurate to the passions of this quiet man who lived in Buenos Aires and in Geneva, though mostly in the vast nutshell of his own mind.

In “The False Problem of Ugolino,” an essay on Dante not included in “On Writing,” Borges quotes from an essay by Stevenson that makes the rather Borgesian claim that a book’s characters are only a string of words. “Blasphemous as this sounds to us,” Borges comments, “Achilles and Peer Gynt, Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote, may be reduced to it.” Borges then adds: “The powerful men who ruled the earth, as well: Alexander is one string of words, Attila another.” The great deeds of the past may become no more than words, and no more than words are necessary to summon a power as grand and enduring even as Quixote or Achilles.

Among the vast books that do not really exist, and that Borges has commented on, are the innumerable pages of the future. Borges’s work answers the unanswerable weight of his reading, the boyish and the arcane at once. The pages of both what he wrote and what he only traced the shadows of present us with their own wavering interrogations; we are happy and afraid to be lost amid our insufficient and unceasing responses. Borges created his precursors, even Stevenson. We still do not know how to create Borges.