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June 04, 2006
Borges, You So Gorgeous!
I haven't read Borges since high school - something which must be remedied post-haste and pre-Aires.
Though, frankly, I'm getting so ridiculously excited for this trip I can't even find muster the focus to dress myself - much less devote the kind of attention his work so clearly deserves.
Oh life. It's bigger.
So let's do Borges in a way even my splintered, Adam Curry/JJ Jackson/Martha Quinn-riddled mind can handle - short quotes!
Whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
- "The Garden of Forking Paths"
Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
- Lecture entitled "The Divine Comedy," 1977
I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think of things in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This -- amateur Protestant that I am -- I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets.
- Autobiographical essay 1970
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
- Afterword to El hacedor, 1960
Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
- "The Threatened One," from The Unending Rose
Posted by Bree at June 4, 2006 09:49 AM