The Philosophical Detective Quotes

“we’re the same man, but that’s an illusion: I’m pure light, as quick and weightless as desire, timeless if not immortal; he’s flesh and blood, heavy with pain and regret, a dying animal like any other.  Yet I’m fastened to him, no matter how bad he makes me look.  Even now his pain distorts my face, though all I feel is pity.”
― Bruce Hartman, The Philosophical Detective

“he came from Argentina and had been known to write reviews of nonexistent books; he was obsessed with labyrinths and—most unusual in a blind man—he had a deathly fear of mirrors.  The”
― Bruce Hartman, The Philosophical Detective

“It always puzzled me why Borges was so terrified of mirrors.  He claimed to detest them on philosophical grounds, because they fill the world with abstractions.  “A mirror creates an illusion which, being outside of time and space, is more terrifying than anything it reflects,” he told me once.  “A blind man can still see his nightmares.” Then one morning in the coffee shop I realized that what he saw in every mirror was a messenger of death.  “All art and wisdom begin in the confrontation of two selves,” he said as he stirred his maté.  “The accidental, temporal self that clings to a dying body, and the archetypal self that underlies our experience and so can never be part of it.  That second self—the true self, if you credit the mystics—appears only at the moment of death, usually in a mirror.” “In a mirror?” I repeated. “According to folklore,” he smiled. “Can everyone see it there?” “Only the person who is dying.  To anyone else it would seem an illusion.”
― Bruce Hartman, The Philosophical Detective

“De Quincey’s claim that all philosophers are murdered, which I’d dismissed as a frivolity, had taken on a sinister, unsettling character, like a prophecy that had been fatally ignored.  Even if it was not factual, Borges suggested, we had to acknowledge that in some sense it was true. “All philosophers are the same philosopher,” he said.  “Just as all the blind men groping around the elephant are the same man.” “Why is that?” “There’s only one reality.”
― Bruce Hartman, The Philosophical Detective

“By the way,” Borges said.  “That horrible music—what was it?” “The Grateful Dead,” I told him. “The Grateful Dead.”   I could see him shaking his head in the rearview mirror.  “A band of discordant dualists!” “I doubt it.  They’re just a—” He silenced me with a thump of his cane.  “To be grateful that you’re dead—that your material existence has ceased—may seem the ultimate rejection of dualism.  Yet it implies a body, albeit a dead one, that is separate from the soul.  I would like to ask this band of cacophonists: Who’s going to be left to feel grateful after you’re dead?  Other than myself, of course.”
― Bruce Hartman, The Philosophical Detective

“My work is literary and aesthetic, and therefore profoundly moral in nature.” I nodded uncomprehendingly. “What is always omitted from a word or any other symbol?”  He answered his own question:  “The thing that the symbol refers to.  For that reason art—though it concerns itself only with balance and order and symmetry—is always about justice and morality.”
― Bruce Hartman, The Philosophical Detective

“The man has read all the books,” Borges said, “even written a few, and yet he is a buffoon and a moral pygmy.  How can that be?  Is literature just a game, like playing cards, that can be played equally well by a scoundrel or a saint?”
― Bruce Hartman, The Philosophical Detective

“Everyone in the room breathed an inner sigh of relief: the murder was Jensen’s doing, not ours. But Borges would not let us off so easily. “We must all certainly deplore what Professor Jensen did. Yet we should bear in mind that the difference between Mr. Jensen and ourselves—and I mean every man and woman in this room, excluding, of course, my wife—is more a difference of literary genealogy than moral culpability.”
― Bruce Hartman, The Philosophical Detective

“Borges stirred the metal straw around in his cup and went on: “If two brothers, starting on the day they were born, read all the same books in the same order, they would have the same ethics.  In a moral sense they would be the same man.  You or I, depending on the syllabus, might be Howard Vaughan.  Cain might be Abel.”
― Bruce Hartman, The Philosophical Detective

“Like all old men, I nurse the illusion that if I can remember enough of the past and imagine enough of the future, I will never reach the end of my life, or if I do, it will take forever to get there.”
― Bruce Hartman, The Philosophical Detective