In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

PRESENT = PAST (ETERNITY) 405
found pictured in the tombs of the Egyptian kings are seen today in the
hands of the workmen in Cairo. Nevertheless, [the university] has a great
socializing influence" (1926 Quad, 98). If, with reference to an institution,
Eternity is a form of continuity that is grounded in an immemorial
Past, the concept is often projected onto an even broader time-span when
it refers to landscape and nature. This is the case with Hart Crane's
mythologizing portrait of North Labrador:
A land of leaning ice
Hugged by plaster-grey arches of sky,
Flings itself silently
Into eternity ...
Cold-hushed, there is only the shifting of moments
That journey toward no Spring-
No birth, no death, no time nor sun
In answer.
(Crane, 21)
At first glance, Jorge Luis Borges seems much less serious than Crane
when, in one of his poems, he writes about the "mythical founding of
Buenos Aires." Beginning with the opening stanzas, the scenes from the
Past that he evokes are full of commonplaces obviously drawn from
history books and historical maps:
And was it by this river of drowsiness and mud
That the ships arrived to found my homeland?
Would the little painted boats be wrecked
between the seaweed and the treacherous current?
Thinking it over carefully, we must suppose that the river
was bluish then, as if it had come from the sky,
with a little red star to mark the place
where Juan Dfaz fasted and the Indians ate.
(Borges, 95)
But the more Borges develops this bookish mythology, the clearer it
becomes that he is unwilling to separate the Past of the moment of
founding from the Present of Buenos Aires and from the modern topog-