Borges and I
The other one, Borges, is the one to whom things happen.
I wander through Buenos Aires, and pause, perhaps
mechanically nowadays, to gaze at an entrance archway and its
metal gate; I hear about Borges via the mail, and read his name
on a list of professors or in some biographical dictionary. I
enjoy hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography,
etymology, the savour of coffee and Stevenson’s prose: the
other shares my preferences but in a vain way that transforms
them to an actor’s props. It would be an exaggeration to say that
our relationship is hostile; I live, I keep on living, so that
Borges can weave his literature, and that literature justifies me.
It’s no pain to confess that certain of his pages are valid, but
those pages can’t save me, perhaps because good writing
belongs to no one, not even the other, but only to language and
tradition. For the rest, I am destined to vanish, definitively, and
only some aspect of me can survive in the other. Little by little,
I will yield all to him, even though his perverse habit of
falsifying and exaggerating is clear to me. Spinoza understood
that all things want to go on being themselves; the stone
eternally wishes to be stone, and the tiger a tiger. I am forced to
survive as Borges, not myself (if I am a self), yet I recognise
myself less in his books than in many others, less too than in
the studious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free
myself from him, and passed from suburban mythologies to
games of time and infinity, but now those are Borges’ games
and I will have to think of something new. Thus my life is a
flight and I will lose all and all will belong to oblivion, or to
that other.
I do not know which of us is writing this page.
The other one, Borges, is the one to whom things happen.
I wander through Buenos Aires, and pause, perhaps
mechanically nowadays, to gaze at an entrance archway and its
metal gate; I hear about Borges via the mail, and read his name
on a list of professors or in some biographical dictionary. I
enjoy hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography,
etymology, the savour of coffee and Stevenson’s prose: the
other shares my preferences but in a vain way that transforms
them to an actor’s props. It would be an exaggeration to say that
our relationship is hostile; I live, I keep on living, so that
Borges can weave his literature, and that literature justifies me.
It’s no pain to confess that certain of his pages are valid, but
those pages can’t save me, perhaps because good writing
belongs to no one, not even the other, but only to language and
tradition. For the rest, I am destined to vanish, definitively, and
only some aspect of me can survive in the other. Little by little,
I will yield all to him, even though his perverse habit of
falsifying and exaggerating is clear to me. Spinoza understood
that all things want to go on being themselves; the stone
eternally wishes to be stone, and the tiger a tiger. I am forced to
survive as Borges, not myself (if I am a self), yet I recognise
myself less in his books than in many others, less too than in
the studious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free
myself from him, and passed from suburban mythologies to
games of time and infinity, but now those are Borges’ games
and I will have to think of something new. Thus my life is a
flight and I will lose all and all will belong to oblivion, or to
that other.
I do not know which of us is writing this page.
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