The story is told in Junin or in Tapalque. A boy disappeared after an Indian attack. People said the Indians had kidnapped him. He parents searched for him in vain. Then, long years later, a soldier who came from the interior told them about an Indian with blue eyes who might well be their son. […]
But space hemmed him in on every side and held him in its toils, with the multitude of other faintly stirring, faintly struggling things, such as the children, the lodges and the gates, and like a sweat of things the moments streamed away in a great chaotic conflux of oozings and torrents, and the trapped […]
“Yes that’s what she wanted, that was the purpose of her action,” my compassionate reason assured me; but I felt that, in doing so, my reason was still basing itself on the same hypothesis which it had adopted from the start. Whereas I was well aware that it was the other hypothesis which had invariably […]
By Jorge Luis Borges . . (NOTE ON TRANSLATION: Other translators have used the English title The Maker; both English titles refer to the Spanish original El Hacedor.) . PART I (Short Stories) Introduction To Leopold Lugones The Maker (El Hacedor) Dreamtigers Dialogue on a Dialogue Toenails The Draped Mirrors Argumentum Ornithologicum The Captive The […]
A Universal History of Iniquity (1935) Preface to the First Edition
By John Burnside aeonmagazine ‘I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls.’ Henry David Thoreau’s remark about his experience of solitude expresses many of the common ideas we have about the work — and the apparent privileges — of being alone. As he put it so […]
. . . Such is the cowardice of society people. That of a lady who came to greet me by my name, was greater still. I tried to recall hers as I talked to her; I remembered quite well having met her at dinner, and could remember things that she had said. But my attention, […]
Ends are ape-chosen; only the means are man’s. NARRATOR Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth. What remains is the dumb or studiedly jocular desperation of one who is aware of the […]
By Adam Kirsch wsj.com One of my favorite stories from World War II concerns the great British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, who in 1944 led the daring mission to kidnap the commander of the German forces occupying Crete. The general, Karl Heinrich Kreipe, was held captive in a mountain cave, where one morning the […]
Against time and the damages of the brain Sharpen and calibrate. Not yet in full, Yet in some arbitrated part Order the facade of the listless summer. Spies, moving delicately among the enemy, The younger sons, the fools, Set somewhat aside the dialects and the stained skins of feigned madness, Ambiguously signal, baffle, the eluded […]
I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers. Though he has often been resistant — children so seldom know what is good for them — I have taught him to appreciate all the groundbreaking musicmakers of our time — […]
Werther, Selected Letters, 1771 May 22nd The illusion that life is but a dream has occurred to quite a few people, and I feel the same way about it. When I see the limitations imposed on man’s powers of action and inquiry and observe how all his efficiency is aimed at nothing but the satisfaction […]
The Floating Library 