Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

1Jorge Luis BorgesBorges and IThe other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happento. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for amoment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of anentrance hall and the grillwork on the gate. I know of Borgesfrom the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in abiographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteencenturytypography, the taste of coffee and the prose ofStevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way thatturns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be anexaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship. I live,let myself go on living. so that Borges may contrive hisliterature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effortfor me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, butthose pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongsto no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and totradition. Besides I am destined to perish, definitively, andonly some instant of myself can survive in him. Little bylittle, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quiteaware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifyingthings. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in theirbeing; the stone eternally wants to be a stone, and the tiger atiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is truethat I am someone), but I recognize myself les in his books thanin many others or in the laborious strum-“Borges and ,I by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by James E. Irby, fromLabyrinths; Selected Stories and Other Writings, edited by Donald A.Yates and James E. Irby. Copyright © 1962 by New Directions PublishingCorp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions, New York.