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Tag Archives: borges

The Effort Required to Disbelieve a World

Players had an entire “Night”—the length of which they agreed on themselves—to reach the heart of the labyrinth and find the exit. Bencivenga had surpassed his own genius by creating a maze generated by the variables determined by the rolls of the die. However, the real game began only when one of the characters finally […]

Go Alone in the Middle of the Feast

We have another classical text, Lucretius’ De rerum natura where personal immortality is denied. The most memorable of the arguments given by Lucretius is this: A person complains that he is going to die. He thinks that the future will forget him. As Victor Hugo said, “He will go alone in the middle of the […]

Urges Onto the Whale-road the Unresisting Heart

Forþon nu min hyge hweorfeð ofer hreþerlocan, min modsefa mid mereflode, ofer hwæles eþel hweorfeð wide, eorþan sceatas—cymeð eft to me gifre ond grædig; gielleð anfloga, hweteð on hwælweg hreþer unwearnum ofer holma gelagu. And now my spirit twists out of my breast, my spirit out in the waterways, over the whale’s path it soars […]

From Each Open Tab

Settle a bet? Music or the smell of good cooking may make people stop and enjoy. Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. Its bitter heart may be tenanted now by black and white ants, but its odorous leaves were once […]

Moonhandled and Weird

Unmoved by what the wind does, The windows Are not rattled, nor do the various Areas Of the house make their usual racket— Creak at The joints, trusses and studs. Instead, They are still. And the maples, Able At times to raise havoc, Evoke Not a sound from their branches’ Clutches. It’s my night to […]

Used First to Praise the Sea or Sword

At fifty generations’ end (And such abysses time affords us all) I return to the further shore of a great river That the vikings’ dragons did not reach, To the harsh and arduous words That, with a mouth now turned to dust, I used in my Northumbrian, Mercian days Before I became a Haslam or […]

A River With A Name Unknown

Let us look for a third tiger. This one will be a form in my dreams like all others, a system, an arrangement of human language, and not the flesh-and-bone tiger that, out of the reach of all mythologies, paces the earth. I know all this; yet something drives me to this ancient, perverse adventure, […]

Strange Crawling Carpets of the Grass

A Second Childhood —GK Chesterton When all my days are ending And I have no song to sing, I think that I shall not be too old To stare at everything; As I stared once at a nursery door Or a tall tree and a swing. Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangs On all my sins […]

John Vincent Moon

Entonces comprendí que su cobardía era irreparable. Le rogué torpemente que se cuidara y me despedí. Me abochornaba ese hombre con miedo, como si yo fuera el cobarde, no Vincent Moon. Lo que hace un hombre es como si lo hicieran todos los hombres. Por eso no es injusto que una desobediencia en un jardín […]

Judge All These in a Room Together

Being aware of the history of literature—or of any other art, for that matter—is really a form of unbelieving, a form of skepticism. If I say to my self, for example, that Wordsworth and Verlaine were very good nineteenth-century poets, then I may fall into the danger of thinking that time has some how destroyed […]