“Boast of QuietnessWritings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like tounderstand them.Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.They speak of humanity.My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of that same poverty.They speak of homeland.My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls.Time is living me.More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.My name is someone and anyone.I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.”

“i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.”

“A: Absorbed in our discussion of immortality, we had let night fall without lighting the lamp, and we couldn't see each other's faces. With an offhandedness or gentleness more convincing than passion would have been, Macedonio Fernandez' voice said once more that the soul is immortal. He assured me that the death of the body is altogether insignificant, and that dying has to be the most unimportant thing that can happen to a man. I was playing with Macedonio's pocketknife, opening and closing it. A nearby accordion was infinitely dispatching La Comparsita, that dismaying trifle that so many people like because it's been misrepresented to them as being old... I suggested to Macedonio that we kill ourselves, so we might have our discussion without all that racket. Z: (mockingly) But I suspect that at the last moment you reconsidered. A: (now deep in mysticism) Quite frankly, I don't remember whether we committed suicide that night or not.”

“There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.”

“SomeoneA man worn down by time,a man who does not even expect death(the proofs of death are statisticsand everyone runs the riskof being the first immortal),a man who has learned to express thanksfor the days' modest alms:sleep, routine, the taste of water,an unsuspected etymology,a Latin or Saxon verse,the memory of a woman who left himthirty years ago nowwhom he can call to mind without bitterness,a man who is aware that the presentis both future and oblivion,a man who has betrayedand has been betrayed,may feel suddenly, when crossing the street,a mysterious happinessnot coming from the side of hopebut from an ancient innocence,from his own root or from some diffuse god.He knows better than to look at it closely,for there are reasons more terrible than tigerswhich will prove to himthat wretchedness is his duty,but he accepts humblythis felicity, this glimmer.Perhaps in death when the dustis dust, we will be foreverthis undecipherable root,from which will grow forever,serene or horrible,or solitary heaven or hell.”

“The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate. I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship. I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone, and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.I do not know which of us has written this page.”

“Days and nights passed over this despair of flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain - perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream.”