Walls Without consideration, without pity, without shame they have built great and high walls around me. And now I sit here and despair. I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind; for I had many things to do outside. Ah why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls. […]
Thermopylae Honor to those who in their lives have defined and guard their Thermopylae. Never stirring from duty; just and upright in all their deeds, yet with pity and compassion too; generous when they are rich, and when they are poor, again a little generous, again helping as much as they can; always speaking the […]
The images preserved by a cultural elite undoubtedly also have political significanse as they influence the decisions of the groups that govern, and it is no wonder that the statesmen who signed the Yalta agreement so easily wrote off a hundered million Europeans from these blank areas in the loss column. Perhaps it was then […]
De er ikke blitt bedre eller mer moderate. De er bare blitt mer raffinerte og smarte. Eldre dame i film om Andrej Sakharov
And yet, and yet … Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are obvious acts of desperation and secret consolation. Our fate (unlike the hell of Swedenborg or the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironclad. Time is the […]
The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future. Cf. also the essay on Hawthorne in the same volume, in which Borges says: «Wakefield» prefigures Franz Kafka, but the latter modifies, and sharpens, the reading of «Wakefield.» The […]
It is known that Whistler when asked how long it took him to paint one of his «nocturnes» answered: «All of my life.» With the same rigor he could have said that all of the centuries that preceded the moment when he painted were necessary. From that correct application of the law of causality it […]
Den lyse nat – det klare hvælv som møder os i mindet Den er et tegn for Danmark selv dets åbenhed i sindet. Den stille sne – den hvide fred omkring vor barndoms banke Den er et træk vi kendes ved en svalhed i vor tanke. Det åbne sind, den svale ro så god en […]
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. Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), «Funes the Memorious,» Labyrinths (1964).
Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary […]
