Stillness in the dark. Street lights haloing in the grey dark. A house deafening in its presence. In the city at night, one has intimations of eternity…


I wish to record here an experience I had some nights ago, a trifling matter too evanescent and ecstatic to be called an adventure, too irrational and sentimental to be called a thought. I am speaking of a scene and its word, a word I had said before but not lived with total involvement until that night. I shall describe it now, with the incidents of time and place that happened to reveal it. This is how I remember it: I had spent the afternoon in Barracas, a place I rarely visited, a place whose distance from the scene of my later wanderings lent a strange aura to that day. As I had nothing to do that night and the weather was fair, I went out after dinner to walk and remember. I had no wish to have a set destination; I followed a random course, as much as possible; I accepted, with no conscious anticipation other than avoiding the avenues or wide streets, the most obscure invitations of chance. A kind of familiar gravitation, however, drew me toward places whose name I shall always remember, for they arouse in me a certain reverence. I am not speaking of the specific surroundings of my childhood, my own neighbourhood, but of its still mysterious borders, which I have possessed in words but little in reality, a zone that is familiar and mythological at the same time. The opposite of the known – its reverse side – are those streets to me, almost as completely hidden as the buried foundation of our house or our invisible skeleton. My walk brought me to a corner, I breathed the night, in peaceful respite from thought. The vision before me, in no way complicated, in any case seemed simplified by my fatigue. It was so typical that it seemed unreal. It was a street of low houses, and although the first impression was poverty, the second was undoubtedly joyous. The street was both very poor and very lovely. No house stood out on the street; a fig tree cast a shadow over a corner wall; the street doors – higher than the lines extending along the walls – seemed made of the same infinite substance as the night…

I stood looking at that simple scene, I thought, no doubt aloud: «This is the same as it was thrity years ago…» I guessed at the date: a recent time in other countries, but already remote in this changing part of the world. Perhaps a bird was singing and I felt for him a small, birdsize affection; but most probably the only noise in this vertiginous silence was the equally timeless sound of the crickets. The easy thought I am somewhere in the 1800s ceased to be a few careless words and became profoundly real. I felt dead, I felt I was an abstract perceiver of the world, struck by an undefined fear imbued with science, or the supreme clarity of metaphysics. No, I did not believe I had traversed the presumed waters of Time; rather I suspected that I possessed the reticent or absent meaning of the inconcievable word eternity. Only later was I able to define these imaginings.

Now I shall transribe it thus: that pure representation of homogeneous facts – calm night, limpid wall, rural scent of honeysuckle, elemental clay – is not merely identical to the scene on that corner so many years ago; it is, without similarities or repititions, the same. If we can intuit that sameness, time is a delusion: the impartiality and inseparability of one moment of time's apparent yesterday and another of time's apparent today are enough to make it disintergrate.

It is evident that the number of these human moments is not infinite. The basic elemental moments are even more impersonal – physical suffering and physical pleasure, the approach of sleep, listening to a single piece of music, moments of great intensity or great dejection. I have reached, in advance, the following conclusion: life is too impoverished not to be also immortal. But we do not even possess the certainty of our poverty, inasmuch as time, easily denied by the senses, is not so easily denied by the intellect, from whose essence the concept of succession seems inseparable. So then, let my glimpse of an idea remain as an emotional anecdote; let the real moment of ecstacy and the possible insinuation of eternity which that night lavished on me, remain confined to this sheet of paper, openly unresolved.

Jorge Luis Borges, 'Feeling in Death'

One can never predict when such a moment will strike. Like déjà vu or the half-wakedness just after a powerful dream – it hits us and we understand that for a moment we have crossed worlds are temporarily in another space and then… We return.