Borges and I

The other one, Borges, is the one things happen to. I wander around Buenos Aires, pausing perhaps unthinkingly, these days, to examine the arch of an entranceway and its metal gate. I hear about Borges in letters, I see his name on a roster of professors and in the biographical gazetteer. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typeface, the taste of coffee, and Stevenson’s prose. The other one likes the same things, but his vanity transforms them into theatrical props. To say that our relationship is hostile would be an exaggeration: I live, I stay alive, so that Borges can make his literature, and this literature is my justification. I readily admit that a few of his pages are worthwhile, but these pages are not my salvation, perhaps because good writing belongs to no one in particular, not even to my other, but rather to language and tradition. As for the rest, I am fated to disappear completely, and only a small piece of me can possibly live in the other one. I’m handing everything over to him bit by bit, fully aware of his nasty habit of distortion and aggrandizement. Spinoza knew that all things desire to endure in their being: stones desire to be stones, and tigers tigers, for all eternity. I must remain in Borges rather than in myself (if in fact I am a self), and yet I recognize myself less in his books than in many others, or in the rich strumming of a guitar. Some years ago I tried to get away from him: I went from suburban mythologies to playing games with time and infinity. But these are Borges’ games now—I will have to think of something else. Thus my life is an escape. I will lose everything, and everything will belong to oblivion, or to the other.

I don’t know which of us wrote this.