Labyrinths

by Jorge Luis Borges

The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Sextus Empiricus argues in a parallel manner that definitions are in vain, since one will have to define each of the words used and then define the definition (Hypotyposes, II, 207).

To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality.

It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. It is also venturesome to think that of all these illustrious coordinations, one of them—at least in an infinitesimal way—does not resemble the universe a bit more than the others.

John Stuart Mill, at the beginning of the nineteenth, feared that some day the number of musical combinations would be exhausted and there would be no place in the future for indefinite Webers and Mozarts;

Kurd Lasswitz, at the end of the nineteenth, toyed with the staggering fantasy of a universal library which would register all the variations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols, in other words, all that it is given to express in all languages.

like all men, he was given bad times in which to live.

Berkeley affirmed the existence of personal identity, “I my self am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking active principle that perceives . . .” (Dialogues, 3); Hume, the skeptic, refutes this identity and makes of every man “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity” (op. cit., I, 4, 6).

Lichtenberg, in the eighteenth century, proposed that in place of “I think” we should say, impersonally, “it thinks,” just as one would say “it thunders” or “it rains.”

If ten thousand people die with you, their participation in your lot will not make you be ten thousand times more hungry nor multiply the time of your agony ten thousand times. Do not let yourself be overcome by the horrible sum of human sufferings; such a sum does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain are cumulative.”

At the age of twenty-odd years he went to London. Instinctively he had already become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one;