by Jennifer

Some words Antonio Machado wrote about his book, The Countryside of Castile (1912), translated by Robert Bly in Times Alone:

“We are victims, I thought, of a double hallucination. If we look outward, and concentrate on entering things, our external world begins to lose solidity, and if if we conclude that it exists not in and for itself, but exists because of us, it ends by dissolving. . .

However, if, moved by our private reality, we turn our eyes inward, then the world pushes in on us, and it is our interior world, our being, that disappears. What to do then?”

*photo by Debora Koyama

Perhaps Borges begins to answer at the end of his essay, The Wall and the Books:

“The firm wall, which at this and in every moment casts its system of shadows over lands I shall never see, is the shadow of a Caesar who ordered the most reverent of nations to burn its past; it is likely that, aside from the conjectures it permits, this idea itself move us. (Its virtue may reside in its opposition, on an enormous scale, between constructing and destroying.) Generalizing upon this, we might infer that all forms possess their virtue in themselves and not in any conjectural “content.” This would accord with Benedetto Croce’s thesis; and Pater had already, in 1877, asserted that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, which is pure form. Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces scored by time, certain twilights, certain places, all want to tell us something, or told us something we should not have missed, or are about to tell us something. This imminence of a revelation that does not take place is, perhaps, the esthetic fact.”  – Translated by Irving Feldman

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