Borges

01 Mar 2022 12:48 - 16 Dec 2022 12:22
Open in Logseq
    • The misfortune of being recognized has befallen him. He deserved better. He deserved to remain in obscurity, in the Imperceptible, to remain as ineffable and unpopular as nuance itself. There he was at home. Consecration is the worst of punishments – for a writer in general, and particularly for a writer of his kind. Once everyone starts quoting him, you must leave off; if you do not, you feel you are merely swelling the ranks of the “admirers,” of his enemies. Those who want to do him justice at all costs are merely hastening his downfall.
    • Yeah well Borges already dealt with this problem himself:
    • 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... 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.