Sleep If sleep is truce, as it is sometimes said,a pure time for the mind to rest and heal,why, when they suddenly wake you, do you feelthat they have stolen everything you had? Why is it so sad to be awake at dawn?It strips us of a gift so strange, so deep,it can be remembered… Continue reading Jorge Luis BorgesJorg
Who will you be tonight, in the dark thrallof sleep, when you have slipped across its wall? — Jorge Luis Borges, Poetry (June 1993)
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face. —… Continue reading Jorge Luis Borges
If dreaming really were a kind of truce(as people claim), a sheer repose of mind,why then if you should waken up abruptly,do you feel that something has been stolen from you?Why should it be so sad, the early morning?It robs us of an inconceivable gift,so intimate it is only knowablein a trance which the nightwatch… Continue reading Jorge Luis Borges
Being with you or without youis how I measure my time. — Jorge Luis Borges, from “The Threatened One,” The Gold of the Tiger, trans. Alastair Reid (Dutton, 1977)
Everything is: the shadows in the glassWhich, in between the day’s two twilights, youHave scattered by the thousands, or shall strewHenceforward in the mirrors that you pass.And everything is part of that diverseCrystalline memory, the universe; — Jorge Luis Borges, from “Everness,” transl. Richard Wilbur,, Wilbur’s New and Collected Poems (HBJ, 1988)
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? ― Jorge Luis Borges, from “Paradiso, XXXI, 108,” Dreamtigers. (University of Texas Press; 13th ed. edition 1985) Originally published 1960 as El Hacedor.
We were imagism, cubism,the conventicals and sectsthat the credulous universities venerate.We invented the lack of punctuation,the leaving out of capital letters,the stanzas in the form of a dovefrom the libraries of Alexandria. — Jorge Luis Borges, from “Invocation to Joyce,” The New Yorker. 12/13/1969, Vol. 45 Issue 43
This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries –embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and yet in others both of us… Continue reading Jorge Luis Borges
The moon of the nights is not the moonWho the first Adam saw. The long centuriesOf human vigil have filled herWith ancient lament. Look at her. She is your mirror. — Jorge Luis Borges, “The Moon,” Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poems, edited by Alexander Coleman (Penguin, 1999)
The Vale of Soul-Making 