“The destiny of any person, no matter how complex and long it may be, ultimately comes down to a single moment – the moment when a person once and for all discovers who they are.”
What reaction does this phrase evoke in you?
Do you ever have those moments when you don’t understand it mentally, but everything inside tells you that this something is meant for you?
Recently, I was listening to a song by one of my favorite singers, “It’s all for you.” These words often resonate within me when something happens to me which is unclear so far. And so it happened with this encounter.
When I was a student, good books were worth their weight in gold, and sometimes it happened that I could spend my entire scholarship at the book market. It was like a good hunt.
And one day, as a result of another trip, I came home with three hefty volumes of Borges. I didn’t know who he was then, but I had an immediate reaction that it was something for me and that I wouldn’t leave without these three volumes. Thus, the gateway to an absolutely stunning world settled on my bookshelf.
I remember one evening I was working, preparing for classes, and suddenly my gaze fell upon these three volumes. I was literally lifted up, all the work was put aside, and I took these books and began flipping through them. It was a very strange feeling because those blank verses were only just touching me, and I couldn’t even understand what they were about. I simply felt them. I felt something. And I left bookmarks. This touch brought a state of being well-filled.
The next time I opened these books at the bookmarks, those same blank verses came alive with a multitude of colors and meanings. And this touch cut me open. I just sat there stunned by the power, scope, depth and a painfully familiar style of it all. Tears streamed down my face, and it felt like encountering a long lost old friend.
Today, on August 24th, it’s the birthday of my long-time friend 🙂 Jorge Luis Borges (which is interesting because his profile is 2/4 for those familiar with Human Design), an outstanding Argentine writer, poet, and essayist whose significance to world culture is hard to overestimate.
Borges’ works nourish me and connect me to some eternal essence.
Here are a few of his gems:
“Of Heaven and Hell”
by Jorge Luis Borges
The Inferno of God is not in need of
the splendor of fire…
Nor does the far point of the years conceal
a secret garden…
In the clear glass of a dream, I have glimpsed
the Heaven and Hell that lie in wait for us:
when Judgement Day sounds in the last trumpets
and planet and millennium both
disintegrate, and all at once, O Time,
all your ephemeral pyramids cease to be,
the colors and the lines that trace the past
will in the semi-darkness form a face,
a sleeping face, faithful, still, unchangeable
(the face of the loved one, or, perhaps, your own)
and the sheer contemplation of that face —
never-changing, whole, beyond corruption —
will be, for the rejected, an Inferno,
and, for the elected, Paradise.
translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid
1942
“Blessed are the ones not hungry for righteousness, for it belongs either to everyone or to no one.”
“Truly, we live, putting off everything we can put off for later; perhaps, deep down, we believe we are immortal, and that sooner or later, we will have time to do everything and know everything.”
