A Personal Anthology

Jorge Luis Borges

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780802190741
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires

Handpicked works from the greatest Argentinian writer of the twentieth century. "Without Borges the modern Latin American novel simply would not exist" (Carlos Fuentes, author and diplomat). After almost a half a century of scrupulous devotion to his art, Jorge Luis Borges personally compiled this anthology of his work—short stories, essays, poems, and brief mordant "sketches, " which, in Borges's hands, take on the dimensions of a genre unique in modern letters. In this anthology, the author has put together those pieces on which he would like his reputation to rest; they are not arranged chronologically, but with an eye to their "sympathies and differences." A Personal Anthology, therefore, is not merely a collection, but a new composition. "An important work, by far the best yet available to the reader... who seeks a representative sampling of the great Argentine writer... the standard introduction to Borges in England and the United States." — Saturday Review

A NEW REFUTATION
OF TIME

Vor mir keine Zeit, nach mir wird keine seyn.
Mit mir gebiert sie sich, mit mir geht sie auch ein.

—Daniel von Czepko,
Sexcenta Monidisticha Sapientum. III, II (1655).

PROLOGUE

Had this refutation (or even the title) been published in the middle of the eighteenth century, it would survive in Hume's bibliographies or might even have merited a line by Huxley or Kemp Smith. But published in 1947—post- Bergson—it is an anachronistic reductio ad absurdum of a preterite system or, what is worse, the feeble artifice of an Argentinian gone astray in the maze of metaphysics. Both conjectures are credible and perhaps even true: I can not promise, so as to emend them, a startling resolution in exchange for my rudimentary dialectic. The thesis which I shall expound is as old as Zeno's arrow or the chariot of the Greek king in the Milinda Panha; its novelty, if any, consists in applying to my ends the classic instrument of Berkeley. Both he and his continuer, David Hume, abound in paragraphs which contradict or exclude my thesis; nevertheless, I believe I have deduced the inevitable consequence of their doctrine.

The first article (A) was written in 1944 and appeared in Number 115 of the Argentine magazine Sur; the second, dating from 1946, is a revision of the first piece. I deliberately refrained from making the two into one, in the belief that the reading of two analogous texts could facilitate the comprehension of intractable matter.

A word on the title: I am not oblivious of the fact that it is an example of the monster the logicians call contradictio in adjecto, for to say that a refutation of time is new (or old, for that matter) is to attribute to it a temporal predicate, thus restoring at once the very notion the subject strives to destroy. Still and all I shall let it stand, so that its ever-so- slight mockery give proof that I do not overrate the importance of this play on words. And then, too, our language is so thoroughly saturated and animated with the notion of time that quite possibly not a single sentence in all these pages fails to require or invoke it.

I dedicate these exercises to my ancestor Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur (1797-1824), who left a memorable hendecasyllable or two to Argentine letters and who strove to reform the teaching of philosophy by purifying it of theological shadows and explaining the theories of Locke and Condillac in his courses. He died in exile: it was his lot, as it is the lot of all men, to live in bad times.

A

I

In the course of a life dedicated to belles-lettres and, occasionally, to the perplexities of metaphysics, I have glimpsed or foreseen a refutation of time, one in which I myself do not believe, but which tends to visit me at night and in the hours of weary twilight, with the illusory force of an axiom. This refutation is to be found, in one form or another, in all of my books: it is prefigured in the poems “Inscripción en cualquier sepulcro” and “El truco” from my Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923); it is openly stated in two articles in my Inquisiciones (1925), on page 46 of the 1930 edition of Evaristo Carriego, in the story “Sentirse en muerte” from my Historia de la eternidad (1936), on page 46 of the 1942 edition of my book El jardín de senderos que se bijurcan. None of these texts satisfies me, not even the penultimate one in the list, which is less demonstrative and reasoned than divinatory and inclined toward pathos. I will attempt, by the present writing, to establish a basis for all of them.

Two arguments led me to this refutation of time: the idealism of Berkeley and Leibnitz’ principle of indiscernibles. Berkeley (in Principles of Human Knowledge, 3) observed: “That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what everybody will allow. And it seems no less evident that the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense, however blended or combined together (that is, whatever objects they compose), cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them. . . . The table I write on I say exists—that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed—meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it. . . . For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived, that seems perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.”

In Paragraph 23 he added, foreseeing objections: “But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them. I answer, you may say so, there is no difficulty in it; but what is all this, I beseeck you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive them? But do not you yourself perceive or think of them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose; it only shews you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind: but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible the objects of your thought may exist without the mind. . .”

In another paragraph, Number 6, he had already declared: “Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, to wit, that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit. . .”

Such is, in the words of its inventor, the idealist doctrine. To understand it is easy; the difficulty lies in thinking within its limitations. Schopenhauer himself, in expounding it, is guilty of some culpable negligence. In the first lines of his book Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung—dating from the year of 1819—he formulates the following declaration, which makes him a creditor as regards the sum total of imperishable human perplexity: “The world is my representation. The man who confesses this truth clearly understands that he does not know a sun nor an earth, but only some eyes which see a sun and a hand which feels an earth.” That is, for the idealist Schopenhauer a man's eyes and hands are less illusory or unreal than the earth or the sun. In 1844, he publishes a complementary volume. In the very first chapter he rediscovers and aggravates the previous error: he defines the universe as a cerebral phenomenon, and he distinguishes between the “word in the head” and the “world outside the head.” Berkeley, nevertheless, will have made his Philonous say, in 1713: “The brain therefore you speak of, being a sensible thing, exists only in the mind. Now, I would fain know whether you think it reasonable to suppose, that one idea or thing existing in the mind, occasions all other ideas. And if you think so, pray how do you account for the origin of that primary idea or brain itself?” To Schopenhauer's dualism, or cerebralism, Spiller's monism may legitimately be counterposed. Spiller (in The Mind of Man, Ch. VIII, 1902) argues that the retina and the cutaneous surface invoked to explain visual and tactile phenomena are, in turn, two tactile and visual systems, and that the room we see (the “objective” one) is no greater than the imagined ("cerebral") one, and that the former does not contain the latter, since there are two independent visual systems involved. Berkeley (in Principles of Human Knowledge, 10 and 116) likewise denied primary qualities—the solidity and extension of things—or the existence of absolute space.

Berkeley affirmed the continuous existence of objects, inasmuch as when no individual perceives them, God does. Hume, with greater logic, denies this existence (in Treatise of Human Nature, I, 4, 2). Berkeley affirmed personal identity, “for I myself am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking active principle that perceives” (Dialogues, 3). Hume, the skeptic, refutes this belief, and makes each man “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity” (op. cit., I, 4,6). Both men affirmed the existence of time: for Berkeley it is “the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly, and is participated in by all beings” (Principles of Human Knowledge, 98). For Hume, it is “a succession of indivisible moments” (op. cit., I, 2,2).

I have here accumulated citations from the apologists of idealism, I have been prodigal with passages from their canon, I have been reiterative and explicit, I have censured Schopenhauer (not without ingratitude), all so that my reader may gradually penetrate this unstable world of the mind: a world of evanescent impressions; a world without matter or spirit, neither objective nor subjective; a world without the ideal architecture of space; a world made of time, of the absolute uniform time of the Principia; an indefatigable labyrinth, a chaos, a dream. It was to this almost perfect disintegration that David Hume was led.

Once the idealist argument is accepted, I understand that it is possible—perhaps inevitable—to go even further. For Hume, it is not licit to speak of the form of the moon or its color: its form and color are the moon. Neither can one speak of the mind's perceptions, inasmuch as the mind is nothing but a series of perceptions. The Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” is thus invalidated: to say I think is to postulate the I, and is a petitio principii. In the eighteenth century, Lichtenberg proposed that in place of I think, we should say, impersonally, it thinks, just as one could say it thunders or it flashes (lightning). I repeat: there is not, behind the visages, a secret I governing our acts and receiving our impressions. We are, merely, the series of those imaginary acts and those errant impressions. The series? Once matter and spirit—which are continua—are denied, once space is denied, I don't see what right we have to that continuum which is time. Let us imagine a present moment, any one at all. A night on the Mississippi. Huckleberry Finn wakes up. The raft, lost in the semi-obscurity, continues on downstream. It may be a bit cold. Huckleberry Finn recognizes the soft indefatigable sound of the water. Negligently he opens his eyes: he sees an indefinite number of stars, a nebulous line which is that of the trees. Then he sinks into a memoryless sleep, as into dark water.1 Metaphysical idealism declares that to add to these perceptions a material substance (the object) and a spiritual substance (the subject) is venturesome and vain. I maintain that it is no less illogical to think that they are terms in a series whose beginning is as inconceivable as its end. To add to the river and the river bank perceived by Huck the notion of yet another substantive river with another river bank, to add yet another perception to that immediate network of perceptions is altogether unjustifiable in the eyes of idealism. In my eyes, it is no less unjustifiable to add a chronological precision: for instance, the fact that the above-mentioned event should have taken place on the night of June 7, 1849, between 4:10 and 4:11. To put it in other words: I deny, using the arguments of idealism, the vast temporal series which idealism allows. Hume denied the existence of an absolute space, in which each thing has its place; I deny the existence of one single time, in which all events are linked. To deny coexistence is no less difficult than to deny succession.

I deny, in a high number of instances, the existence of succession. I deny, in a high number of instances, contemporaneity as well. The lover who thinks While I was so happy, thinking of my love's faithfulness, she was busy deceiving me, is deceiving himself. If every state in which we live is absolute, that happiness was not contemporary to that betrayal. The discovery of that betrayal is merely one more state, incapable of modifying “previous” states, though not incapable of modifying their recollection. Today's misadventure is no more real than yesterday's felicity. I will look for a more concrete example: At the beginning of August 1824, Captain Isidoro Suárez, at the head of a squadron of Peruvian hussars, decided the Victory of Junín; at the beginning of August 1824, De Quincey issued a diatribe against Wilhelnt Meisters Lehrjahre; these deeds were not contemporaneous (they are now), inasmuch as the two men died—the one in the city of Montevideo, the other in Edinburgh—knowing nothing about each other. . . . Every instant is autonomous. Not vengeance nor pardon nor jails nor even oblivion can modify the invulnerable past. No less vain to my mind are hope and fear, for they always refer to future events, that is, to events which will not happen to us, who are the minute present. They tell me that the present, the “specious present” of the psychologists, lasts from between several seconds and the smallest fraction of a second: such is the length of the history of the universe. Or better, there is no such thing as “the life of a man,” nor even “one night in his life.” Each moment we live exists, not the imaginary combination of these moments. The universe, the sum total of all events, is a collection no less ideal than the sum of all the horses of which Shakespeare dreamt—one, many, none?—between 1592 and 1594. And: if time is a mental process, how can myriads of men, or even two distinct men, share it at all?

The argument set forth in the preceding paragraphs, rather encumbered and interrupted by examples, may seem intricate. I will find a more direct method. Let us consider a life in whose course repetitions abound: my life, for instance. I never pass in front of the Recoleta cemetery without remembering that my father, my grandparents, and great-grandparents are buried there, just as I shall be; then I remember having remembered the same thing innumerable times before; I can not walk through the outlying neighborhoods of the city in the silence of the night without thinking that nighttime is pleasing precisely because it does away with useless details, like memory; I can not lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating on how one only loses what one really never had; each time I cross one of the streets in South Buenos Aires, I think of you, Helen; every time the wind brings me the odor of eucalyptus, I think of Adrogué in my childhood; each time I recollect Fragment 91 of Heraclitus, You never go down to the same stream twice, I admire his dialectical skill, for the facility with which we accept the first meaning ("The stream is another") clandestinely imposes upon us the second meaning ("I am another") and grants us the illusion of having invented it; every time I hear a Germanophile running down Yiddish, I reflect that Yiddish is, after all, a German dialect, only slightly tainted by the language of the Holy Ghost. These tautologies (and others which I keep back) are my entire life. Naturally, they repeat themselves without precision; there are variations of emphasis, differences of temperature, of light, of general physiological condition. I suspect, nonetheless, that the number of circumstantial variations is not infinite: we can postulate, in the mind of an individual (or of two individuals who do not know each other but in both of whom the same process is operative), two identical moments. Once this identity is postulated, we may ask: Are not these identical moments the same moment? Is not one single repeated terminal point enough to break up and confound the series in time? Are not the fervent Shakespeareans who give themselves over to a line of Shakespeare, are they not, literally, Shakespeare?

I do not know, yet, the ethics of the system I have here outlined. I do not know if they exist. The fifth paragraph of the fourth chapter of the treatise Sanhedrin of the Mish- nah declares that, as far as the Justice of God is concerned, whoever kills one man destroys the world. If there is no plurality, whoever would annihilate all mankind would be no more culpable than primitive and solitary Cain—an orthodox point of view—nor more universal in his destructiveness—which may be magical. That is the way I understand it, too. Clangorous general catastrophes—conflagrations, wars, epidemics—are a single grief, multiplied in numerous mirrors illusorily. Such is Bernard Shaw's judgment (Guide to Socialism, 86): “What you can suffer is the maximum that can be suffered on earth. If you die of starvation, you will suffer all the starvation there has been or will be. If ten thousand people die with you, their participation in your lot will not make you be ten thousand times more hungry nor multiply the time of your agony ten thousand times. Do not let yourself be overcome by the horrible sum of human sufferings; such a sum does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain are cumulative.” (Cf. also The Problem of Pain, VII, by C. S. Lewis.)

Lucretius (De rerum natura, I, 830) attributes to Anaxagoras the doctrine that gold consists of particles of gold, fire of sparks, bone of tiny imperceptible bones. Josiah Royce, perhaps influenced by St. Augustine, is of the opinion that time is made up of time and that “every now within which something happens is therefore also a succession” (The World and the Indivi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Prologue
• Death And The Compass
• The Plot
• The South
• A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez, Victor at JunÍn
• The Dead Man
• Matthew 25:30
• Funes, the Memorious
• A New Refutation of Time
• Limits
• Limits
• The Circular Ruins
• Chess
• The Golem
• Inferno I, 32
• The Other Tiger
• A Yellow Rose
• Baltasar Gracián
• To an Old Poet
• Parable of the Palace
• The Wall and the Books
• The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald
• Ariosto and the Arabs
• Averroës’ Search
• A Soldier of Urbina
• The Maker
• Everything and Nothing
• From Someone to no One
• Forms of a Legend
• The Zahir
• The Aleph
• The Cyclical Night
• Allusion to a Ghost of the Eighteen-Nineties
• The Tango
• Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)
• The End
• Story of the Warrior and the Captive
• The Captive
• Paradiso XXXI, 108
• Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)
• The Witness
• The Modesty of History
• The Secret Miracle
• Conjectural Poem
• The Gifts
• The Moon
• The Art of Poetry
• Borges and I
• Poem Written in a Copy Op Beowulf
• Editor's Epilogue