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There Is No Exercise Of The Intellect Which Is Not, In The Final Analysis, Useless. A Philosophical Doctrine Begins As A Plausible Description Of The Universe; With The Passage Of The Years It Becomes A Mere Chapter If Not A Paragraph Or A Name In The History Of Philosophy.

-Jorge Luis Borges

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There Is No Exercise

Jorge Luis Borges

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There Is No Exercise Of The Intellect Which Is Not, In The Final Analysis, Useless. A Philosophical Doctrine Begins As A Plausible Description Of The Universe; With The Passage Of The Years It Becomes A Mere Chapter If Not A Paragraph Or A Name In The History Of Philosophy.

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To Think, Analyze And Invent, He [pierre Menard] Also Wrote Me, “are Not Anomalous Acts, But The Normal Respiration Of The Intelligence. To Glorify The Occasional Fulfillment Of This Function, To Treasure Ancient Thoughts Of Others, To Remember With Incredulous Amazement That The Doctor Universal Is Thought, Is To Confess Our Languor Or Barbarism. Every Man Should Be Capable Of All Ideas, And I Believe That In The Future He Will Be." (jorge Luis Borges, "pierre Menard, Author Of Don Quixote, 1939)

I Know Of One Semibarbarous Zone Whose Librarians Repudiate The "vain And Superstitious Habit" Of Trying To Find Sense In Books, Equating Such A Quest With Attempting To Find Meaning In Dreams Or In The Chaotic Lines On The Palms Of One's Hand.

I Secretly Assumed, As Poets Do, The Duty On Me To Define The Moon.

There Are No Moral Or Intellectual Merits. Homer Composed The Odyssey; If We Postulate An Infinite Period Of Time, With Infinite Circumstances And Changes, The Impossible Thing Is Not To Compose The Odyssey, At Least Once.

Impossible Things

Writing Is Only A Guided Dream.

Nowadays, One Of The Churches Of Tlön Maintains Platonically That Such And Such A Pain, Such And Such A Greenish-yellow Colour, Such And Such A Temperature, Such And Such A Sound, Etc., Make Up The Only Reality There Is. All Men, In The Climactic Instant Of Coitus, Are The Same Man. All Men Who Repeat One Line Of Shakespeare Are William Shakespeare.

The Two Important Facts I Should Say, Are Emotion, And Then Words Arising From Emotion. I Don't Think You Can Write In An Emotionless Way. If You Attempt It, The Result Is Artificial. I Don't Like That Kind Of Writing. I Think That If A Poem Is Really Great, You Should Think Of It As Having Written Itself Despite The Author. It Should Flow.

The Great American Writer Herman Melville Says Somewhere In The White Whale That A Man Ought To Be 'a Patriot To Heaven,' And I Believe It Is A Good Thing, This Ambition To Be A Cosmopolitan, This Idea To Be Citizens Not Of A Small Parcel Of The World That Changes According To The Currents Of Politics, According To The Wars, To What Occurs, But To Feel That The Whole World Is Our Country.

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.

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.

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

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

Every Man Should Be Capable Of All Ideas.

It Only Takes Two Facing Mirrors To Build A Labyrinth.

A Writer, Or Any Man, Must Believe That Whatever Happens To Him Is An Instrument; Everything Has Been Given For An End. This Is Even Stronger In The Case Of The Artist. Everything That Happens, Including Humiliations, Embarrassments, Misfortunes, All Has Been Given Like Clay, Like Material For One's Art. One Must Accept It.

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

Time Is The Substance From Which I Am Made. Time Is A River Which Carries Me Along, But I Am The River; It Is A Tiger That Devours Me, But I Am The Tiger; It Is A Fire That Consumes Me, But I Am The Fire.

Whatever One Man Does, It Is As If All Men Did It. For That Reason, It Is Not Unfair That One Disobedience In A Garden Should Contaminate All Humanity; For That Reason It Is Not Unjust That The Crucifixion Of A Single Jew Should Be Sufficient To Save It.

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

Literature Is Not Exhaustible, For The Sufficient And Simple Reason That A Single Book Is Not.

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

I Cannot Sleep Unless I Am Surrounded By Books.

In Adultery, There Is Usually Tenderness And Self-sacrifice; In Murder, Courage; In Profanation And Blasphemy, A Certain Satanic Splendour. Judas Elected Those Offences Unvisited By Any Virtues: Abuse Of Confidence And Informing.

Each Thing Implies The Universe.

In Truth, The Library Includes All Verbal Structures, All Variations Permitted By The Twenty-five Orthographical Symbols, But Not A Single Example Of Absolute Nonsense.

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.

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.

Reality Is Not Always Probable, Or Likely. But If You're Writing A Story, You Have To Make It As Plausible As You Can, Because If Not, The Reader's Imagination Will Reject It.

My Father Gave Me Free Run Of His Library. When I Think Of My Boyhood, I Think In Terms Of The Books I Read.

The European And The North American Consider That A Book That Has Been Awarded Any Kind Of Prize Must Be Good; The Argentine Allows For The Possibility That The Book Might Not Be Bad, Despite The Prize.

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

The Central Problem Of Novel-writing Is Causality.

For Myth Is At The Beginning Of Literature, And Also At Its End.

Time Broadens The Scope Of Verses And I Know Of Some Which, Like Music, Are Everything For All Men.

Democracy Is An Abuse Of Statistics.

The Falklands Thing Was A Fight Between Two Bald Men Over A Comb.

In The Course Of A Life Devoted Less To Living Than To Reading, I Have Verified Many Times That Literary Intentions And Theories Are Nothing More Than Stimuli And That The Final Work Usually Ignores Or Even Contradicts Them.

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

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

Many Of The Characters Are Fools And They're Always Playing Tricks On Me And Treating Me Badly.

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 We're Capable Of Knowledge, But I Like To Keep An Open Mind. So If You Ask Me Whether I Believe In An Afterlife Or Not, Whether I Believe In God Or Not, I Can Only Answer You That All Things Are Possible. And If All Things Are Possible, Heaven And Hell And The Angels Are Also Possible. They're Not To Be Ruled Out.

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.

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.

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.

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

Kafka Had The Sense Of Guilt. I Don't Think I Have Because I Don't Believe In Free Will. Because What I Have Done Has Been Done, Well, For Me Or Through Me. But I Haven't Done It Really. But I Don't Believe In Free Will, I Can't Feel Guilty.

The Steps A Man Takes From The Day Of His Birth Until That Of His Death Trace In Time An Inconcievable Figure. The Divine Mind Intuitively Grasps That Form Immediately, As Men Do A Triangle.

The Truth Is That We Live Out Our Lives Putting Off All That Can Be Put Off; Perhaps We All Know Deep Down That We Are Immortal And That Sooner Or Later All Men Will Do And Know All Things.

Procrastination

Why Do You Seem So Annoyed At What I'm Saying?" "because We're Too Much Like Each Other. I Loathe Your Face, Which Is A Caricature Of Mine, I Loathe Your Voice, Which Is A Mockery Of Mine, I Loathe Your Pathetic Syntax, Which Is My Own.

Art Always Opts For The Individual, The Concrete; Art Is Not Platonic.

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.

A Man Sets Himself The Task Of Portraying The World. Shortly Before He Dies He Discovers That This Patient Labyrinth Of Lines Is A Drawing Of His Own Face.

Another School Declares That All Time Has Already Transpired And That Our Life Is Only The Crepuscular And No Doubt Falsified And Mutilated Memory Or Reflection Of An Irrecoverable Process.

Any Life, However Long And Complicated It May Be, Actually Consists Of A Single Moment — The Moment When A Man Knows Forever More Who He Is.

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?

The Time For Your Labor Has Been Granted.

Reality Favors Symmetry.

The Sea Is An Idiom I Cannot Decipher.

I Wonder If I Have Woven Through Dreams The Sexual Strife. I Don't Think So. But After All, My Business Is To Weave Dreams. I Suppose I May Be Allowed To Choose The Material.

The Mathematical Sciences Wield Their Particular Language Made Of Digits And Signs, No Less Subtle Than Any Other.

He Constructed A Vast Labyrinthine Of Periods, Made Impassable By The Piling-up Of Clauses Upon Clauses-clauses In Which Oversight And Bad Grammar Seemed Manifestations Of Disdain.

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.

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

Emma Dropped The Paper. Her First Impression Was Of A Weak Feeling In Her Stomach And In Her Knees; Then Of Blind Guilt, Of Unreality, Of Coldness, Of Fear; Then She Wished That It Were Already The Next Day. Immediately Afterwards She Realized That That Wish Was Futile Because The Death Of Her Father Was The Only Thing That Had Happened In The World, And It Would Go On Happening Endlessly.

While We Are Asleep In This World, We Are Awake In Another One

Doubt Is One Of The Names Of Intelligence.

Music, Feelings Of Happiness, Mythology, Faces Worn By Time, Certain Twilights And Certain Places, Want To Tell Us Something, Or They Told Us Something That We Should Not Have Missed, Or They Are About To Tell Us Something; This Imminence Of A Revelation That Is Not Produced Is, Perhaps, The Esthetic Event.

I Have Preferred To Teach My Students Not English Literature But My Love For Certain Authors, Or, Even Better, Certain Pages, Or Even Better Than That, Certain Lines. One Falls In Love With A Line, Then With A Page, Then With An Author. Well, Why Not? It Is A Beautiful Process.

Falling In Love

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.

Everything Touches Everything.

A Writer's Work Is The Product Of Laziness.

The Mind Was Dreaming. The World Was Its Dream.

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

The People Of Tlön Are Taught That The Act Of Counting Modifies The Amount Counted, Turning Indefinites Into Definites. The Fact That Several Persons Counting The Same Quantity Come To The Same Result Is For The Psychologists Of Tlön An Example Of The Association Of Ideas Or Of Memorization.

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

The Possibilities Of The Art Of Combination Are Not Infinite, But They Tend To Be Frightful.

I Thought That A Man Can Be An Enemy Of Other Men, Of The Moments Of Other Men, But Not Of A Country: Not Of Fireflies, Words, Gardens, Streams Of Water, Sunsets.

He Thought That The Rose Was To Be Found In Its Own Eternity And Not In His Words; And That We May Mention Or Allude To A Thing, But Not Express It.

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

There Is No Point In Being Overwhelmed By The Appalling Total Of Human Sufferring; Such A Total Does Not Exist. Neither Poverty Nor Pain Is Accumulable.

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

We Are As Ignorant Of The Meaning Of The Dragon As We Are Of The Meaning Of The Universe.

A Writer - And, I Believe, Generally All Persons - Must Think That Whatever Happens To Him Or Her Is A Resource.

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.

We Have Shared Out, Like Thieves, The Amazing Treasures Of Days And Nights.

The Dictionary Is Based On The Hypothesis -- Obviously An Unproven One -- That Languages Are Made Up Of Equivalent Synonyms.

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

I...have Always Known That My Destiny Was, Above All, A Literary Destiny — That Bad Things And Some Good Things Would Happen To Me, But That, In The Long Run, All Of It Would Be Converted Into Words. Particularly The Bad Things, Since Happiness Does Not Need To Be Transformed: Happiness Is Its Own End.

Canada Is So Far Away It Hardly Exists.

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

La Duda Es Uno De Los Nombres De La Inteligencia.

I Think It's All To The Good That A Writer Shouldn't Be Too Famous. Because, In A Country Where A Writer May Be Famous, He May Be Pandering To The Mob, Celebrity And So On.

Once I Am Dead, There Will Be No Lack Of Pious Hands To Throw Me Over The Railing; My Grave Will Be The Fathomless Air; My Body Will Sink Endlessly And Decay And Dissolve In The Wind Generated By The Fall, Which Is Infinite.

May Heaven Exist, Even If My Place Is Hell.

Time Can't Be Measured In Days The Way Money Is Measured In Pesos And Centavos, Because All Pesos Are Equal, While Every Day, Perhaps Every Hour, Is Different.

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.

I Am Not Sure Of Anything, I Know Nothing . . . Can You Imagine That I Don't Even Know The Date Of My Own Death?

This Web Of Time--the Strands Of Which Approach One Another, Bifurcate, Intersect Or Ignore Eachother Through The Centuries--embrace Every Posibility.

I Know Of A Wild Region Whose Librarians Repudiate The Vain Superstitious Custom Of Seeking Any Sense In Books And Compare It To Looking For Meaning In Dreams Or In The Chaotic Lines Of One's Hands . . . They Admit That The Inventors Of Writing Imitated The Twenty-five Natural Symbols, But They Maintain That This Application Is Accidental And That Books In Themselves Mean Nothing. This Opinion - We Shall See - Is Not Altogether False.

The Future Has No Other Reality Than As Present Hope, And The Past Is No More Than Present Memory.

All Theories Are Legitimate, No Matter. What Matters Is What You Do With Them.

I Had Always Thought Of Paradise / In Form And Image As A Library.

I Have Used The Philosophers' Ideas For My Own Private Literary Purposes, But I Don't Think That I'm A Thinker. I Suppose That My Thinking Has Been Done For Me By Berkeley, By Hume, By Schopenhauer, By Mauthner Perhaps.

I Live In A Grey World, Rather Like The Silver Screen World. But Yellow Stands Out.

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.

The Poverty Of Yesterday Was Less Squalid Than The Poverty We Purchase With Our Industry Today. Fortunes Were Smaller Then As Well.

There Is Nothing In The World That Is Not Mysterious, But The Mystery Is More Evident In Certain Things Than In Others: In The Sea, In The Eyes Of The Elders, In The Color Yellow, And In Music.

Don't Talk Unless You Can Improve The Silence.

Time Is The Substance Of Which We Are Made

When You Reach My Age, You Realize You Couldn't Have Done Things Very Much Better Or Much Worse Than You Did Them In The First Place.

What Will Die With Me When I Die, What Pathetic Or Fragile Form Will The World Lose?

On Those Remote Pages [of 'a Certain Chinese Encyclopedia'] It Is Written That Animals Are Divided Into (a) Those That Belong To The Emperor, (b) Embalmed Ones, (c) Those That Are Trained, (d) Suckling Pigs, (e) Mermaids, (f ) Fabulous Ones, (g) Stray Dogs, (h) Those That Are Included In This Classification, (i) Those That Tremble As If They Were Mad, (j) Innumerable Ones, (k) Those Drawn With A Very Fine Camel's Hair Brush, (l) Others, (m) Those That Have Just Broken A Flower Vase, (n) Those That Resemble Flies From A Distance.

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.

Reality Is Partial To Symmetry And Slight Anachronisms

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

Falling In Love

I Have Always Come To Life After Coming To Books.

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

Mir Bahadur Ali Is, As We Have Seen, Incapable Of Evading The Most Vulgar Of Art's Temptations: That Of Being A Genius.

The Mightiest Love Was Granted Him Love That Does Not Expect To Be Loved.

The Word Happiness Exists In Every Language; It Is Plausible The Thing Itself Exists.

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

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

Had I To Give Advice To Writers (and I Do Not Think They Need It, Because Everyone Has To Find Out Things For Himself), I Would Tell Them Simply This; I Would Ask Them To Tamper As Little As They Can With Their Own Work. I Do Not Think Tinkering Does Any Good. The Moment Comes When One Has Found Out What One Can Do - When One Has Found One's Natural Voice, One's Rhythm. Then I Do Not Think That Slight Emendations Should Prove Useful.

Loneliness Does Not Worry Me; Life Is Difficult Enough, Putting Up With Yourself And With Your Own Habits.

Lully's Machine, Mill's Fear And Lasswitz's Chaotic Library Can Be The Subject Of Jokes, But They Exaggerate A Propensity Which Is Common: Making Metaphysics And The Arts Into A Kind Of Play With Combinations.

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.

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.

What I'm Really Concerned About Is Reaching One Person. And That Person May Be Myself For All I Know.

There Is No Exercise Of The Intellect Which Is Not, In The Final Analysis, Useless. A Philosophical Doctrine Begins As A Plausible Description Of The Universe; With The Passage Of The Years It Becomes A Mere Chapter If Not A Paragraph Or A Name In The History Of Philosophy.

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

I Never Reread What I've Written. I'm Far Too Afraid To Feel Ashamed Of What I've Done.

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

I Am Not Sure That I Exist, Actually. I Am All The Writers That I Have Read, All The People That I Have Met, All The Women That I Have Loved; All The Cities I Have Visited.

It's A Shame That We Have To Choose Between Two Such Second-rate Countries As The Ussr And The Usa.

My Advanced Age Has Taught Me The Resignation Of Being Borges.

Censorship Is The Mother Of Metaphor.

To Be Immortal Is Commonplace; Except For Man, All Creatures Are Immortal, For They Are Ignorant Of Death; What Is Divine, Terrible, Incomprehensible, Is To Know That One Is Immortal.

I Write For Myself, And Perhaps For Half A Dozen Friends. And That Should Be Enough. And That Might Improve The Quality Of My Writing. But If I Were Writing For Thousands Of People, Then I Would Write What Might Please Them. And As I Know Nothing About Them, And Maybe I'd Have A Rather Low Opinion Of Them, I Don't Think That Would Do Any Good To My Work.

In Our Dreams (writes Coleridge) Images Represent The Sensations We Think They Cause; We Do Not Feel Horror Because We Are Threatened By A Sphinx; We Dream Of A Sphinx In Order To Explain The Horror We Feel.

There Are Those Who Seek The Love Of A Woman To Forget Her, To Not Think About Her.

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

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

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 Future Is As Irrevocable As An Inflexible Yesterday.

Although I'm Very Lazy When It Comes To Writing, I'm Not That Lazy When It Comes To Thinking. I Like To Develop The Plan Of A Short Story, Then Cut It As Short As Possible, Try To Evolve All The Necessary Details. I Know Far More About The Characters Than What Actually Comes Out Of The Writing.

Perhaps The Apparent Favor Of The Universe Is No More Than The Crocodile Grin Of A Doberman Breathing Hard And About To Be Hungry?

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.

In Spanish It Is Very Difficult To Make Things Flow, Because Words Are Over-long. But In English, You Have Light Words.

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 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.

The Flattery Of Posterity Is Not Worth Much More Than Contemporary Flattery, Which Is Worth Nothing.

I Came To The Idea Of How Fine It Would Be To Think Of An Encyclopedia Of An Actual World, And Then Of An Encyclopedia, A Very Rigorous One Of Course, Of An Imaginary World, Where Everything Should Be Linked.

Your Unforgivable Sins Do Not Allow You To See My Splendor.

Unforgivable Sin

Two Aesthetics Exist: The Passive Aesthetic Of Mirrors And The Active Aesthetic Of Prisms. Guided By The Former, Art Turns Into A Copy Of The Environment's Objectivity Or The Individual's Psychic History. Guided By The Latter, Art Is Redeemed, Makes The World Into Its Instrument, And Forges, Beyond Spatial And Temporal Prisons, A Personal Vision.

That Is What Always Happens: We Never Know Whether We Are Victors Or Whether We Are Defeated.

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?

All Writing Is Dreaming

Life Itself Is A Quotation.

Of All Man’s Instruments, The Most Wondrous, No Doubt, Is The Book. The Other Instruments Are Extensions Of His Body. The Microscope, The Telescope, Are Extensions Of His Sight; The Telephone Is The Extension Of His Voice; Then We Have The Plow And The Sword, Extensions Of The Arm. But The Book Is Something Else Altogether: The Book Is An Extension Of Memory And Imagination.

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.

Writing Is Nothing More Than A Guided Dream.

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.

I Think Most People Are More Important Than Their Opinions.

I Have Always Imagined That Paradise Will Be A Kind Of Library.

There Is No Intellectual Exercise Which Is Not Ultimately Useless.

A Writer Should Have Another Lifetime To See If He's Appreciated.

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.

Then He Reflected That Reality Does Not Usually Coincide With Our Anticipation Of It; With A Logic Of His Own He Inferred That To Forsee A Circumstantial Detail Is To Prevent Its Happening. Trusting In This Weak Magic, He Invented, So That They Would Not Happen, The Most Gruesome Details.

I Would Rather Like To Think Of God As Being A Kind Of Adventurer - Even As Wells Thought About Him - Or Perhaps As Something Within Us Making For Some Unknown Purpose.

Many People Have Thought Of Me As A Thinker, As A Philosopher, Or Even As A Mystic. Well The Truth Is That Though I Have Found Reality Perplexing Enough - In Fact, I Find It Gets More Perplexing All The Time - I Never Think Of Myself As A Thinker.

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.

Thus My Life Is A Flight And I Lose Everything And Everything Belongs To Oblivion, Or To Him.

No One Is A Poet From Eight To Twelve And From Two To Six. Whoever Is A Poet Is One Always, And Continually Assaulted By Poetry.

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.

I Can Give You My Loneliness, My Darkness, The Hunger Of My Heart, I Am Trying To Bribe You With Uncertainty, With Danger, With Defeat.

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

Time Management

I Confess That I Have Not Cleared A Path Through All Seven Hundred Pages, I Confess To Having Examined Only Bits And Pieces, And Yet I Know What It Is, With That Bold And Legitimate Certainty With Which We Assert Our Knowledge Of A City, Without Ever Having Been Rewarded With The Intimacy Of All The Many Streets It Includes.

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.

Islam Asserts That On The Unappealable Day Of Judgment Every Perpetrator Of The Image Of A Living Creature Will Be Raised From The Dead With His Works, And He Will Be Commanded To Bring Them To Life, And He Will Fail, And Be Cast Out With Them Into The Fires Of Punishment.

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

It Means Much To Have Loved, To Have Been Happy, To Have Laid My Hand On The Living Garden, Even For A Day.

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

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

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?

To Bless Thine Enemy Is A Good Way To Satisfy Thy Vanity.

I Owe The Discovery Of Uqbar To The Conjunction Of A Mirror And An Encyclopedia.

Truly Fine Poetry Must Be Read Aloud. A Good Poem Does Not Allow Itself To Be Read In A Low Voice Or Silently. If We Can Read It Silently, It Is Not A Valid Poem: A Poem Demands Pronunciation. Poetry Always Remembers That It Was An Oral Art Before It Was A Written Art. It Remembers That It Was First Song.

A Writer - And, I Believe, Generally All Persons - Must Think That Whatever Happens To Him Or Her Is A Resource. All Things Have Been Given To Us For A Purpose, And An Artist Must Feel This More Intensely. All That Happens To Us, Including Our Humiliations, Our Misfortunes, Our Embarrassments, All Is Given To Us As Raw Material, As Clay, So That We May Shape Our Art.

It Seemed Incredible To Me That Day Without Premonitions Or Symbols Should Be The One Of My Inexorable Death .

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.

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.

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

Israelites, Christians And Muslims Profess Immortality, But The Veneration They Render This World Proves They Believe Only In It, Since They Destine All Other Worlds, In Infinite Number, To Be Its Reward Or Punishment.

He Consorted With Prostitutes And Poets...and With Persons Even Worse.

We Forget That We Are All Dead Men Conversing With Dead Men.

We Are Our Memory, We Are That Chimerical Museum Of Shifting Shapes, That Pile Of Broken Mirrors.

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.

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

The Things That Are Said In Literature Are Always The Same. What Is Important Is The Way They Are Said. Looking For Metaphors, For Example: When I Was A Young Man I Was Always Hunting For New Metaphors. Then I Found Out That Really Good Metaphors Are Always The Same.

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