Borges at Eighty by Jorge Luis Borges

Author:Jorge Luis Borges [Barnstone, Willis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2121-4
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2013-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

8

Time Is the Essential Mystery

University of Chicago,

March 1980 I think that time is the one essential mystery. Other things may be mysterious. Space is unimportant. You can think of a spaceless universe, for example, a universe made of music…. The problem of time involves the problem of ego, for, after all, what is the ego? The ego is the past, the present, and also the anticipation of time to come, of the future.

WILLIS BARNSTONE: Borges, although you are almost blind, you always remark on the qualities of the rooms and buildings you are in. How do you see with your limited eyes, and how do you feel here today in this hall?

JORGE LUIS BORGES: I feel friendship. I feel a very real welcome. Liked by people, loved by people, I feel all that. I don’t feel the circumstances but the essential, way down. I don’t know how I do it, but I’m sure that I am right.

BARNSTONE: You often compare friendship with love. Would you be willing to make a comparison between friendship and love?

BORGES: Love is a very strange thing, full of misgivings, full of hope, and those things may make for happiness. But in friendship there is no misleading, no hope, the thing goes on and on. There’s no need of frequency, we do not need tokens. But we know that if we are friends, and the other person is a friend, perhaps in the long run friendship is more important than love. Or perhaps the true function, the duty of love, is to become friendship. If not, it stops us halfway. But both should be greatly loved.

BARNSTONE: Would you speak of experience and poetry?

BORGES: I think that to a poet (and sometimes I think of myself in that way), all things are given for the purpose of being turned into poetry. So that unhappiness is not really unhappiness. Unhappiness is a tool that is given us, even as a knife may be a tool. All experience should become poetry, and if we were really poets (and I’m not really a poet. I pretend to be a poet), but if I were really a poet, I would think of every moment in life as being beautiful, even though at the moment it may not seem so. But in the end, memory turns all things into beauty. Our task, our duty, is to turn emotions, recollections, even memories of sad things into beauty. That is our task. And the great advantage of that task is that we never attain it. We are always on the point of doing it.

BARNSTONE: In “The Parable of the Prince” from Dreamtigers—

BORGES: I wish I could remember it.

BARNSTONE: Memories are to be forgotten.

BORGES: It’s utterly forgotten.

BARNSTONE: The parable ends with the poet’s descendants still looking for the one word which contains the universe. Are you seeking one word, a state of mind, a feeling, an understanding? What is it that you seek—if anything—before you die?

BORGES: I suppose the only way of finding the right word is not to look for it.

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