It was this something that Borges glimpsed as he paged through his worn copy of Plotinus. To be human, Borges saw, is to straddle the impossible border between ephemerality and eternity, loss and permanence. From the vantage of a sifting, vanishing time we project an eternity hopelessly out of reach. Like the exile who, “with a melting heart,” recalls “expectations of happiness,” we “gather up all the delights of a given past in a single image.”[11] Eternity is nostalgia, the inextinguishable desire for what we’ve lost.[12]
