Jorge Luis Borges in a 1968 interview with Don Bell. Reprinted in Agni #52.

Well, in "The Aleph" I had two ideas in mind. The first was the old idea of the microcosm, the idea that the whole world, the whole universe, the world of the external, might be, for all we know, summed up or enclosed within a very short space, so that we would have, for example, a small shining circle somewhere in a drab house in Buenos Aires and there the whole universe might be found, and therein another aleph, and so on, to infinity. And then I had another idea. I thought of a man being granted a privilege of viewing the universe and making nothing of it but using this privilege to write a nonsensical poem. So those two strains were woven into the story.

Jorge Luis Borges: The Aleph

He proposed to versify the entire planet; by 1941 he had already dispatched several hectares of the state of Queensland.....