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I Foresee That Man Will Resign Himself Each Day To More Atrocious Undertakings; Soon There Will Be No One But Warriors And Brigands; I Give Them This Counsel: The Author Of An Atrocious Undertaking Ought To Imagine That He Has Already Accomplished It, Ought To Impose Upon Himself A Future As Irrevocable As The Past.

-Jorge Luis Borges

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I Foresee That Man

Jorge Luis Borges

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I Foresee That Man Will Resign Himself Each Day To More Atrocious Undertakings; Soon There Will Be No One But Warriors And Brigands; I Give Them This Counsel: The Author Of An Atrocious Undertaking Ought To Imagine That He Has Already Accomplished It, Ought To Impose Upon Himself A Future As Irrevocable As The Past.

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From My Weakness, I Drew Strength That Never Left Me.

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Leaving Behind The Babble Of The Plaza, I Enter The Library. I Feel, Almost Physically, The Gravitation Of The Books, The Enveloping Serenity Of Order, Time Magically Dessicated And Preserved.

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My Books Standing There On The Shelf Do Not Know That I Have Written Them.

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Impossible Things

The Worst Labyrinth Is Not That Intricate Form That Can Entrap Us Forever, But A Single And Precise Straight Line

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I Thought Of A Labyrinth Of Labyrinths, Of One Sinuous Spreading Labyrinth That Would Encompass The Past And The Future . . . I Felt Myself To Be, For An Unknown Period Of Time, An Abstract Perceiver Of The World.

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What You Really Value Is What You Miss, Not What You Have.

Days And Nights Passed Over This Despair Of Flesh, But One Morning He Awoke, Looked (with Calm Now) At The Blurred Things That Lay About Him, And Felt, Inexplicably, The Way One Might Feel Upon Recognizing A Melody Or A Voice, That All This Had Happened To Him Before And That He Had Faced It With Fear But Also With Joy And Hopefulness And Curiosity. Then He Descended Into His Memory, Which Seemed To Him Endless, And Managed To Draw Up From That Vertigo The Lost Remembrance That Gleamed Like A Coin In The Rain - Perhaps Because He Had Never Really Looked At It Except (perhaps) In A Dream.

That One Individual Should Awaken In Another Memories That Belong To Still A Third Is An Obvious Paradox.

People Think That I've Committed Myself To Idealism, To Solipsism, Or To Doctrines Of The Cabala, Because I've Used Them In My Tales. But Really I Was Only Trying To See What Could Be Done With Them. On The Other Hand, It Might Be Argued That If I Use Them It's Because I Was Feeling An Affinity To Them. Of Course, That's True.

A Book Is A Physical Object In A World Of Physical Objects. It Is A Set Of Dead Symbols. And Then The Right Reader Comes Along, And The Words—or Rather The Poetry Behind The Words, For The Words Themselves Are Mere Symbols—spring To Life, And We Have A Resurrection Of The Word.

No One Is Anyone, One Single Immortal Man Is All Men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I Am God, I Am Hero, I Am Philosopher, I Am Demon And I Am World, Which Is A Tedious Way Of Saying That I Do Not Exist.

The Thought Came Over Me That Never Would One Full And Absolute Moment, Containing All The Others, Justify My Life, That All Of My Instants Would Be Provisional Phases, Annihilators Of The Past Turned To Face The Future, And That Beyond The Episodic, The Present, The Circumstantial, We Were Nobody.

Blindness Has Not Been For Me A Total Misfortune; It Should Not Be Seen In A Pathetic Way. It Should Be Seen As A Way Of Life: One Of The Styles Of Living.

Happy Are The Beloved And The Lovers And Those Who Can Live Without Love.

As To My Writing Short Pieces, There Are Two Reasons I Can Give You. The First Is My Invincible Laziness. The Second Is That I've Always Been Fond Of Short Stories, And It Always Took Me Some Trouble To Get Through A Novel.

I Hardly Know What I'm Going To Write - An Article, A Story, A Poem In Free Verse - Or In Some Regular Form. I Only Know That When I Have The First Sentence. And When The First Sentence Makes A Kind Of Pattern, Then I Find Out The Kind Of Rhythm I'm Looking For.

In Fact I'm In Too Much Of A Mental Muddle To Know Where I Am - An Idealist Or Not. I'm A Mere Man Of Letters, And I Do What I Can With Those Subjects.

Like All Those Possessing A Library, Aurelian Was Aware That He Was Guilty Of Not Knowing His In Its Entirety.

The Universe Is Composed Of An Indefinite And Perhaps Infinite Number Of Hexagonal Galleries.

Don't Talk Unless You Can Improve The Silence.

The Sea Is An Idiom I Cannot Decipher.

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You Don't Have To Try To Be Contemporary. You Are Already Contemporary. What One Has In Mythology Is Being Evolved All The Time. Personally, I Think I Can Do With Greek And Old Norse Mythology. For Example, I Don't Think I Stand In Need Of Planes Or Of Railways Or Of Cars.

Heaven And Hell Seem Out Of Proportion To Me: The Actions Of Men Do Not Deserve So Much.

I Don't Think There's Any Essential Difference, At Least For Me, Between Writing Poetry And Writing Prose.

Besides, Rereading, Not Reading, Is What Counts.

Reading Is An Activity Subsequent To Writing: More Resigned, More Civil, More Intellectual.

It Is Clear That There Is No Classification Of The Universe That Is Not Arbitrary And Full Of Conjectures. The Reason For This Is Very Simple: We Do Not Know What Kind Of Thing The Universe Is.

You Can't Measure Time By Days, The Way You Measure Money By Dollars And Cents, Because Dollars Are All The Same While Every Day Is Different And Maybe Every Hour As Well.

We Accept Reality So Readily - Perhaps Because We Sense That Nothing Is Real.

Chang Tzu Tells Us Of A Persevering Man Who After Three Laborious Years Mastered The Art Of Dragon-slaying. For The Rest Of His Days, He Had Not A Single Opportunity To Test His Skills.

I Think Of Reading A Book As No Less An Experience Than Travelling Or Falling In Love.

Falling In Love

So Plant Your Own Gardens And Decorate Your Own Soul, Instead Of Waiting For Someone To Bring You Flowers.

Death Is Just Infinity Closing In.

God Must Not Engage In Theology. The Writer Must Not Destroy By Human Reasonings The Faith That Art Requires Of Us.

Literature Is Not Exhaustible, For The Sufficient And Simple Reason That A Single Book Is Not. A Book Is Not An Isolated Entity: It Is A Narration, An Axis Of Innumerable Narrations. One Literature Differs From Another, Either Before Or After It, Not So Much Because Of The Text As For The Manner In Which It Is Read.

Imprecision Is Tolerable And Verisimilar In Literature, Because We Always Tend Towards It In Life.

Personally, I Am A Hedonistic Reader; I Have Never Read A Book Merely Because It Was Ancient. I Read Books For The Aesthetic Emotions They Offer Me, And I Ignore The Commentaries And Criticism.

Captivated By Its Discipline, Humanity Forgets And Goes On Forgetting That It Is The Discipline Of Chess Players, Not Of Angels.

I Suppose Identity Depends On Memory. And If My Memory Is Blotted Out, Then I Wonder If I Exist - I Mean, If I Am The Same Person. Of Course, I Don't Have To Solve That Problem. It's Up To God, If Any.

You Have Wakened Not Out Of Sleep, But Into A Prior Dream, And That Dream Lies Within Another, And So On, To Infinity, Which Is The Number Of Grains Of Sand. The Path That You Are To Take Is Endless, And You Will Die Before You Have Truly Awakened.

What A Writer Wants To Do Is Not What He Does.

To Say Good-bye Is To Deny Separation; It Is To Say Today We Play At Going Our Own Ways, But We'll See Each Other Tomorrow. Men Invented Farewells Because They Somehow Knew Themselves To Be Immortal, Even While Seeing Themselves As Contingent And Ephemeral.

I, Who Have Been So Many Men In Vain, Want To Be One Man, Myself Alone. From Out Of A Whirlwind The Voice Of God Replied: I Am Not, Either. I Dreamed The World The Way You Dreamed Your Work, My Shakespeare: One Of The Forms Of My Dream Was You, Who, Like Me, Are Many And One.

I Have Known Uncertainty: A State Unknown To The Greeks.

I Walk Slowly, Like One Who Comes From So Far Away He Doesn't Expect To Arrive

We Did Meet Forty Years Ago. At That Time We Were Both Influenced By Whitman And I Said, Jokingly In Part, 'i Don't Think Anything Can Be Done In Spanish, Do You?' Neruda Agreed, But We Decided It Was Too Late For Us To Write Our Verse In English. We'd Have To Make The Best Of A Second-rate Literature.

A . . . Poet Is A Discoverer Rather Than An Inventor.

The Heresies We Should Fear Are Those Which Can Be Confused With Orthodoxy.

One Concept Corrupts And Confuses The Others. I Am Not Speaking Of The Evil Whose Limited Sphere Is Ethics; I Am Speaking Of The Infinite.

Time Is A Fire That Consumes Me, But I Am The Fire.

Time Management

In General, Every Country Has The Language It Deserves.

Being An Agnostic Means All Things Are Possible, Even God, Even The Holy Trinity. This World Is So Strange That Anything May Happen, Or May Not Happen. Being An Agnostic Makes Me Live In A Larger, A More Fantastic Kind Of World, Almost Uncanny. It Makes Me More Tolerant.

Films Are Even Stranger, For What We Are Seeing Are Not Disguised People But Photographs Of Disguised People, And Yet We Believe Them While The Film Is Being Shown.

I Don't Think I Can Really Believe In Doomsday; I Could Hardly Believe In Rewards And Punishments, In Heaven Or Hell. As I Wrote Down In One Of My Sonnets - I Seem To Be Always Plagiarizing, Imitating Myself Or Somebody Else For That Matter - I Think I Am Quite Unworthy Of Heaven Or Of Hell, And Even Of Immortality.

The Art Of Writing Is Mysterious; The Opinions We Hold Are Ephemeral , And I Prefer The Platonic Idea Of The Muse To That Of Poe, Who Reasoned, Or Feigned To Reason, That The Writing Of A Poem Is An Act Of The Intelligence. It Never Fails To Amaze Me That The Classics Hold A Romantic Theory Of Poetry, And A Romantic Poet A Classical Theory.

I Think That The Reader Should Enrich What He Is Reading. He Should Misunderstand The Text; He Should Change It Into Something Else.

We (the Indivisible Divinity That Works In Us) Have Dreamed The World. We Have Dreamed It Resistant, Mysterious, Visible, Ubiquitous In Space And Firm In Time, But We Have Allowed Slight, And Eternal, Bits Of The Irrational To Form Part Of Its Architecture So As To Know That It Is False.

The Aesthetic Event Is Something As Evident, As Immediate, As Indefinable As Love, The Taste Of Fruit, Of Water. We Feel Poetry As We Feel The Closeness Of A Woman, Or As We Feel A Mountain Or A Bay. If We Feel It Immediately, Why Dilute It With Other Words, Which No Doubt Will Be Weaker Than Our Feelings?

If A Writer Disbelieves What He Is Writing, Then He Can Hardly Expect His Reader To Believe It.

Poetry Springs From Something Deeper; It's Beyond Intelligence.

Dictatorships Foster Oppression, Dictatorships Foster Servitude, Dictatorships Foster Cruelty; More Abominable Is The Fact That They Foster Idiocy.

Being With You And Not Being With You Is The Only Way I Have To Measure Time.

Yo, Que Me Figuraba El Paraíso / Bajo La Especie De Una Biblioteca. I Have Always Imagined Paradise As A Kind Of Library.

Truth Never Penetrates An Unwilling Mind.

What Will Die With Me The Day I Die? What Pathetic Or Frail Image Will Be Lost To The World? The Voice Of Macedonio Fernandez, The Image Of A Bay Horse In A Vacant Lot On The Corner Of Sarrano And Charcas, A Bar Of Sulfur In The Drawer Of A Mahogany Desk?

In All Fiction, When A Man Is Faced With Alternatives He Chooses One At The Expense Of Others.

When I Write, I Do It Urged By An Intimate Necessity. I Don't Have In Mind An Exclusive Public, Or A Public Of Multitudes, I Don't Think In Either Thing. I Think About Expressing What I Want To Say. I Try To Do It In The Simplest Way Possible.

My Father And He Had Cemented One Of Those English Friendships Which Begin By Avoiding Intimacies And Eventually Eliminate Speech Altogether.

Life Itself Is A Quotation.

To Arrange A Library Is To Practice In A Quiet And Modest Way The Art Of Criticism.

As A Boy, I Used To Marvel That The Letters In A Closed Book Did Not Get Scrambled And Lost Overnight.

Everything Touches Everything.

Every Man Should Be Capable Of All Ideas.

At The Beginning Of Their Careers Many Writers Have A Need To Overwrite. They Choose Carefully Turned-out Phrases; They Want To Impress Their Readers With Their Large Vocabularies. By The Excesses Of Their Language, These Young Men And Women Try To Hide Their Sense Of Inexperience. With Maturity The Writer Becomes More Secure In His Ideas. He Finds His Real Tone And Develops A Simple And Effective Style.

I'm Not Interested In The Fact That A Writer May Label Himself As Being Intellectual Or Anti-intellectual. L'm Really Interested In The Stuff He's Turning Out.

I Saw All The Mirrors On Earth And None Of Them Reflected Me.

The Earth We Inhabit Is An Error, An Incompetent Parody. Mirrors And Paternity Are Abominable Because They Multiply And Affirm It.

Poetry Remembers That It Was An Oral Art Before It Was A Written Art.

Every Writer Creates His Own Precursors. His Work Modifies Our Conception Of The Past, As It Will Modify The Future.

The Visible Universe Was An Illusion Or, More Precisely, A Sophism. Mirrors And Fatherhood Are Abominable Because They Multiply It And Extend It.

The Fact Is That Poetry Is Not The Books In The Library . . . Poetry Is The Encounter Of The Reader With The Book, The Discovery Of The Book.

The Central Fact Of My Life Has Been The Existence Of Words And The Possibility Of Weaving Those Words Into Poetry.

Creativity Is Suspended Between Memory And Forgetting.

I Would Define The Baroque As That Style That Deliberately Exhausts (or Tries To Exhaust) Its Own Possibilities, And That Borders On Self-caricature. The Baroque Is The Final Stage In All Art, When Art Flaunts And Squanders Its Resources.

As The End Approaches, There Are No Longer Any Images From Memory - There Are Only Words.

I Do Not Write For A Select Minority, Which Means Nothing To Me, Nor For That Adulated Platonic Entity Known As ‘the Masses’. Both Abstractions, So Dear To The Demagogue, I Disbelieve In. I Write For Myself And For My Friends, And I Write To Ease The Passing Of Time.

The Tango Is A Direct Expression Of Something That Poets Have Often Tried To State In Words: The Belief That A Fight May Be A Celebration.

Best Thing To Happen For A Poet. A Fine Death, No? An Impressive Death.

For Me, Beauty Is A Physical Sensation, Something We Feel With Our Whole Body. It Is Not The Result Of Judgement. We Do Not Arrive At It By Way Of Rules. We Either Feel Beauty Or We Don't.

I Am Almost Sure To Be Blotted Out By Death, But Sometimes I Think It Is Not Impossible That I May Continue To Live In Some Other Manner After My Physical Death . Or, As Hamlet Wonders, What Dreams Will Come When We Leave This Body?

Beyond My Anxiety, Beyond This Writing, The Universe Waits, Inexhaustible, Inviting.

He Was Very Religious; He Believed That He Had A Secret Pact With God Which Exempted Him From Doing Good In Exchange For Prayers And Piety.

La Duda Es Uno De Los Nombres De La Inteligencia.

You May Win Your Heart's Desire, But In The End You're Cheated Of It By Death.

Writing Long Books Is A Laborious And Impoverishing Act Of Foolishness: Expanding In Five Hundred Pages An Idea That Could Be Perfectly Explained In A Few Minutes. A Better Procedure Is To Pretend That Those Books Already Exist And To Offer A Summary, A Commentary.

The Task Of Art Is To Transform What Is Continuously Happening To Us, To Transform All Of These Things Into Symbols, Into Music, Into Something Which Can Last In Man’s Memory. That Is Our Duty. If We Don’t Fulfill It, We Feel Unhappy.

The Gods Weave Misfortunes For Men, So That The Generations To Come Will Have Something To Sing About.” Mallarmé Repeats, Less Beautifully, What Homer Said; “tout Aboutit En Un Livre,” Everything Ends Up In A Book. The Greeks Speak Of Generations That Will Sing; Mallarmé Speaks Of An Object, Of A Thing Among Things, A Book. But The Idea Is The Same; The Idea That We Are Made For Art, We Are Made For Memory, We Are Made For Poetry, Or Perhaps We Are Made For Oblivion. But Something Remains, And That Something Is History Or Poetry, Which Are Not Essentially Different.

We Have Stopped Believing In Progress. What Progress That Is !

It Also Occurred To Him That Throughout History, Humankind Has Told Two Stories: The Story Of A Lost Ship Sailing The Mediterranean Seas In Quest Of A Beloved Isle, And The Story Of A God Who Allows Himself To Be Crucified On Golgotha.

His Life, Measured In Space And Time, Will Take Up A Mere Few Lines, Which My Ignorance Will Abbreviate Further.

If I Write A Fantastic Story, I'm Not Writing Something Willful. On The Contrary, I Am Writing Something That Stands For My Feelings, Or For My Thoughts. So That, In A Sense, A Fantastic Story Is As Real And Perhaps More Real Than A Mere Circumstantial Story. Because After All, Circumstances Come And Go, And Symbols Remain.

The Art Of Writing Is Mysterious, The Opinions We Hold Are Ephemeral.

Reality Is Partial To Symmetry And Slight Anachronisms

There Is No Intellectual Exercise Which Is Not Ultimately Useless.

In The Critics' Vocabulary, The Work 'precursor' Is Indispensable, But It Should Be Cleansed Of All Connotations Of Polemics Or Rivalry.

Like All Writers, He Measured The Achievements Of Others By What They Had Accomplished, Asking Of Them That They Measure Him By What He Envisaged Or Planned.

Translations Are A Partial And Precious Documentation Of The Changes The Text Suffers.

I Believe Books Will Never Disappear. It Is Impossible For It To Happen. Of All Man's Diverse Tools, Undoubtedly The Most Astounding Are His Books... If Books Were To Disappear, History Would Disappear. So Would Man.

The Machinery Of The World Is Far Too Complex For The Simplicity Of Men.

What Man Of Us Has Never Felt, Walking Through The Twilight Or Writing Down A Date From His Past, That He Has Lost Something Infinite?

If I Were Asked To Name The Chief Event In My Life, I Should Say My Father's Library.

May Heaven Exist, Even If My Place Is Hell.

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