logo

Witness

A Short Story By Borges

🌱 2022-02-04


Borges story bought to my mind, Töre intense renewal of his faith in Virgin Springs.

At the edge of death, Bill the protagonist of Don Hertzfeldt's It's Such a Beautiful Day suddenly sees the world in a whole new light. It is frightening that humans seem to find renewed vigor for life only when they face how little time they have left.

In four thousand weeks, Oliver Bukerman talks about how starting from a base of hopelessness is actually freeing. The finitude of living is what makes our choices and actions matter.

As Borges says in his short story, What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world?

The complete story:

In a stable that stands almost in the shadow of the new stone church, a man with gray eyes and gray beard, lying amid the odor of the animals, humbly tries to will himself into death, much as a man might will himself to sleep. The day, obedient to vast and secret laws, slowly shifts about and mingles the shadows in the lowly place; outside lie plowed fields, a ditch clogged with dead leaves, and the faint track of a wolf in the black clay where the line of woods begins. The man sleeps and dreams, forgotten.

The bells for orisons awaken him. Bells are now one of evening’s customs in the kingdoms of England, but as a boy the man has seen the face of Woden, the sacred horror and the exultation, the clumsy wooden idol laden with Roman coins and ponderous vestments, the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners. Before dawn he will be dead, and with him, the last eyewitness images of pagan rites will perish, never to be seen again. The world will be a little  poorer when this Saxon man is dead.

Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies may make us stop in wonder—and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man’s or woman’s death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested. In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the Battle of Junin and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonia Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?


Subscribe to my newsletter

Masala Inc.