Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths

lacking compensation in something else, there is one whose theoretical
importance is very small, but which induced us, toward the end or the
beginning of the tenth century, to disperse ourselves over the face of
the earth. It can be stated in these words: "There exists a river whose
waters grant immortality; in some region there must be another river
whose waters remove it." The number of rivers is not infinite; an
immortal traveler who traverses the world will finally, some day, have
drunk from all of them. We proposed to discover that river.
Death (or its allusion) makes men precious and pathetic. They
are moving because of their phantom condition; every act they execute
may be their last; there is not a face that is not on the verge of
dissolving like a face in a dream. Everything among the mortals has
the value of the irretrievable and the perilous. Among the Immortals,
on the other hand, every act (and every thought) is the echo of others
that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, or the faithful
presage of others that in the future will repeat it to a vertiginous
degree. There is nothing that is not as if lost in a maze of indefatigable
mirrors. Nothing can happen only once, nothing is preciously
precarious. The elegiacal, the serious, the ceremonial, do not hold for
the Immortals. Homer and I separated at the gates of Tangier; I think
we did not even say goodbye.
V
I traveled over new kingdoms, new empires. In the fall of 1066,
I fought at Stamford Bridge, I do not recall whether in the forces of
Harold, who was not long in finding his destiny, or in those of the
hapless Harald Hardrada, who conquered six feet of English soil, or a
bit more. In the seventh century of the Hegira, in the suburb of Bulaq,
I transcribed with measured calligraphy, in a language I have
forgotten, in an alphabet I do not know, the seven adventures of
Sinbad and the history of the City of Bronze. In the courtyard of a jail
in Samarkand I played a great deal of chess. In Bikaner I professed the
science of astrology and also in Bohemia. In 1638 I was at Kolozsvar
and later in Leipzig. In Aberdeen, in 1714, I subscribed to the six
volumes of Pope's Iliad; I know that I frequented its pages with
delight. About 1729 I discussed the origin of that poem with a
professor of rhetoric named, I think, Giambattista; his arguments
seemed to me irrefutable. On the fourth of October, 1921, the Patna,
which was taking me to Bombay, had to cast anchor in a port on the
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