« Chocolate with beer | Main | Trinidad Vacation »
December 25, 2004
"Borges and I"
"The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page. "
"Borges and I" Redux by Tim Jones. "Borges comes round with a six-pack just in time for the game. I tell him he could have got it cheaper down the road. He nods unhappily, as is his way..."
The Crimson Hexagon: Books Borges Never Wrote
Shipwreck on dry land - Gabriel García Márquez about Elián González
A last-minute change to Gabriel Garcia Marquez' new novel has dealt a blow to pirates who flooded his native Colombia with bootleg versions of Memories of My Melancholy
Living to tell the tale, excerpts of the first chapter, in Hebrew
I went sailing on a Caribbean vacation for a few weeks. Regular blogging will start in the next day or two. More Unusual Links About Borges & Marquez Here
December 25, 2004 in Books - Gabriel Garcia Marquez | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c858253ef00d83436ca5853ef
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Borges and I:
Comments
It took pop culture as well as science half a century to catch up with Borges. Evidence:
- The Matrix
- Being John Malkovich and the other films written by Charles Kaufman
- and compare the Aleph with the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics. Here's a good site about that.
http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~max/multiverse1.html
Posted by: Tom Buckner at Dec 26, 2004 6:32:33 AM