We forget that we are all dead men
conversing with dead men.[…]
In Alberto Manguel’s short book, With Borges, we can continue in this morbid frame of mind:
For Borges, the core of reality lay
in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way,
he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and
which he believed would never end. Books restoring the past. “In time,” he said
to me, “every poem becomes an elegy.”
Quoted in Jonathan Greene’s Gists Orts Shards II (Broadstone Books, 2011)
