He came to feel affection for the courtyard, the barracks one of the faces before him modified his conception of Roemerstadt's character. In certain instances he came back to the original version. He eliminated certain symbols as over-obvious, such as the repeated striking of the clock, the music. Meticulously, motionlessly, secretly, he wrought in time his lofty, invisible labyrinth. He was not working for posterity or even for God, whose literary tastes were unknown to him. “He had no document but his memory the training he had acquired with each added hexameter gave him a discipline unsuspected by those who set down and forget temporary, incomplete paragraphs. Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings I do not know which of us has written this page.” Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. 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. 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. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being the stone eternally wants to be a stone, and the tiger a tiger. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Besides I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him.
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. I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship. 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. I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. 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. “The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to.
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