Two Poems by Jorge Luis Borges
The SouthTo have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars,
from the bench of shadow to have watched
those scattered lights
that my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations,
to have heard the note of water
in the cistern,
known the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle,
the silence of the sleeping bird,
the arch of the entrance, the damp
--these things perhaps are the poem.
(translated by W. S. Merwin)
Break of DayIn the deep night of the universe
scarcely controlled by the streetlamps
a lost gust of wind
has offended the taciturn streets
like the trembling premonition
of the horrible dawn that prowls
the ruined suburbs of the world.
Curious about the shadows
and daunted by the threat of dawn,
I recalled the dreadful conjecture
of Schopenhauer and Berkeley
which declares that the world
is a mental activity,
a dream of souls,
without foundation, purpose, weight or shape.
And since ideas
are not eternal like marble
but immortal like a forest or a river,
the preceding doctrine
assumed another form as the sun rose,
and in the superstition of that hour
when light like a climbing vine
begins to implicate the shadowed walls,
my reason gave way
and sketched the following fancy:
If things are void of substance
and if this teeming Buenos Aires
is no more than a dream
made up by souls in a common act of magic,
there is an instant
when its existence is gravely endangered
and that is the shuddering instant of daybreak,
when those who are dreaming the world are few
and only the ones who have been up all night retain,
ashen and barely outlined,
the image of the streets
that later others will define.
The hour when the tenacious dream of life
runs the risk of being smashed to pieces,
the hour when it would be easy for God
to level His whole handiwork!
But again the world has been spared.
Light roams the streets inventing dirt colors
and with a certain remorse
for my complicity in the day's rebirth
I ask my house to exist,
amazed and icy in the white light,
as one bird halts the silence
and the spent night
stays on in the eyes of the blind.
(translated by Stephen Kessler)
A Prose Passage by Jorge Luis Borges
Epilogue
[...] A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Over the years he fills a given surface with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, heavenly bodies, horses, and people. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.
- J.L.B.
Buenos Aires, October 31, 1960
(translated by Kenneth Krabbenhoft)
A Long Passage From Daniel Handler's AdverbsThe only reason I'm blah-blah talking about it is so that you get what kind of night it was. Late, is what kind, but also obvious, and the obvious part was sort of messing with the kickass part, if you know what I mean. Like, just for instance, standing ten feet away from Lila was sort of kickass, with her nails drumming on the box with the slot in it where we put everything that we rip in half, and with her blue-eyed beauty and with the gum she was chewing and with how lovely she was, in that way that makes you want to find something else lovely just so you can give it to her and see how really kickass it is to have two lovely things next to each other in the Sovereign Cinemaplex. But the kickassness of Lila was a sort of muted kickassness, a kickassness tainted with melancholy, because there was also the obvious part, which was named Keith.
Keith. Unchivalrous Keith. Keith who picked her up from work every night, and who, if this was Kickass: The Movie, would have a little fuzz of mustache so that we would know what an asshole he was, except this being the real-life Seattle Metropolitan Area there was no way anybody could tell and so he just drove up to the Sovereign and beeped his horn and Lila just pushed open the swinging glass doors with the stupid sticker-heads of all the famous people stuck to them and ran out into the night of Keith without anybody running after her and saying, "Don't go out there to Keith! The boy who has stood by you, at the left-hand escalator, for nine Thursdays and eight Saturdays, loves you very much, plus his chivalry!" Which is the kickass part on my end, the part I think about every Lila moment, from the first bell for Ms. Wylie to the tearing of every little ticket that is handed to me: the total King Arthur chivalry that sits deep in my puny, frantic heart. Example of chivalry, why am I working at the Sovereign? What is the money for? To buy flowers for Lila and to give them to her. Keith? Honk honk honk, please come running out of the Cinemaplex doors and jump into the seat next to me where there are no flowers and I won't even tell you how nice you look, I bet. But my secret special kickass chivalry is tainted, obviously, by obviousness. And it's the obvious thing that it's not going to happen. Because there might be a suburb of Seattle where a girl says, "Oh my god! Flowers? You are chivalrous, Joe," and then I win and she doesn't care that Keith has one of those all-terrain things that will come in so handy when the world ends and we need a nine-thousand-cylinder engine to drive over the hordes of bloodthirsty mutants crawling all over the video-game landscape, or maybe there's a suburb of Seattle where Lila wouldn't care whether or not her chivalrous suitor was wearing a fucking WELCOME TO THE BIG SHOW! button on a red why-the-hell-is-it-fireproof Sovereign Cinemaplex vest which is sort of blocking the signals from this hungry heart of mine, and Lila and I drive around this other suburb of Seattle in a car I take care of myself on weekends and tell each other a big bag of secrets we've been hiding under the beds our parents bought us, tossing and turning over its poky burlap creases and staring out of the window screens at a spooky blue moon that is beaming down secret New York bus tickets of a grown-up love future, and then someplace where the sun is setting or rising she takes her top off, but I don't live in that suburb of Seattle. I live on Mercer Island, and here we just tear tickets and wait to watch her go home.
***
So, um, yeah, I guess that's it!
