It was a bright sunny day today, despite some bad news it seemed for at least during that time that these things, sad news good news, good time and bad times, had nothing to do with me or the real me that was enjoying watching the sun.
That’s my daily inspiration, not the sunny days or the promise of hope in the air but the other me that is always watching but is forever immiscible with the daily today life. Jorge Luis Borges has a short story or some prose if you will about this. I have read a better translation I think by Anthony Kerrigan but like cheap rum this does the trick.
Jorge Luis Borges
“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.
Have you felt this other you or this the passive observer? Do you know which one fo you is reading these words?
Dave
A great start to my morning (not in school) and very thought provaoking. wonder which i am love, saaaaam
or is it saam?? =o