And heres one by Jorge Luis Borges - youre welcome. You do life - dont let life to you. Off to Reiki 3. Borges and I Things happen to him, the other one, to Borges. I stroll about Buenos Aires and stop, almost mechanically now perhaps, to look at the arch of an entranceway and the ironwork gate; news of Borges reaches me in the mail and I see his name on an academic ballot or in a bibliographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and Robert Stevenson’s prose; he shares these preferences, but with a vanity that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that our relationship is a hostile one; I live, I go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature; and that literature justifies me. I do not find it hard to admit that he has achieved some valid pages, but these pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good no longer belongs to anyone, not even to him, the other one, but to the language or to tradition. In any case, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of me may live on in him. Little by little, I yield him ground, the whole terrain, though I am quite aware of his perverse habit of magnifying and falsifying. Spinoza realized that all things strive to persist in their own nature: the stone eternally wishes to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall subsist in Borges, not in myself (assuming I am someone), and yet I recognize myself less in his books than in many another, or in the intricate flourishes on a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him, and I went from mythologies of the city suburbs to games with time and infinity, but now those games belong to Borges, and I will have to think up something else. Thus my life is a flight, and I lose everything, and everything belongs to oblivion or to him. I don’t know which one of the two of us is writing this page.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 13:40:17 +0000