On Order and Time

Osvaldo Ferrari: We've laid the foundation stone for this series of talks and now we are broadcasting over mysterious radio waves. What do you make of all this?

Jorge Luis Borges: Conversation is one of man's better habits and was invented - like almost everything - by the Greeks. That is, the Greeks began to converse, and we have followed ever since.

- Just as through your writing you have revealed a vast knowledge of the world - or your writing through you - I have embarked on the equally vast undertaking of trying to get to know Borges in order that others may know him too.

- Well, 'know thyself' and so forth, as Socrates said to contradict Pythagoras, who was boasting of his travels. Socrates was talking about the interior journey rather than mere tourism, which of course is what I practice. But there's no need to disparage geography, for it may be as important as psychology.

- Of course. One of the impressions we get from your work and from knowing you is that there is an underlying order to which you hew with strict faithfulness.

- If so, I'd like to know what it is.

- All right, it's the order that governs your writing and your actions.

- As for my actions, I don't know about that. The truth is that I've been quite irresponsible. You might say that what I write is no less irresponsible, but I'm talking about what I do, right? I feel I live in a haphazard way even though I try to be an upright man. But my life is rather unstructured, and I strive not to let my writing fall into the same state. That is, I try to give my work some sort of harmony or order, even though what I write is essentially chaotic. As is the universe. We don't quite know whether it is a cosmos or a chaos. Many things indicate that it's a cosmos. We have the different ages of man, the habits of the stars, the growth of plants, the seasons, and the different generations. In other words, there is a certain order but it's an order that's quite secretive and self-effacing.

- Of course, but, to identify it in some way, this order of yours seem to me what Eduardo Mallea described as a 'a stoic glorying in life', which is specific to Argentine men.

- Would that it were.

- Let's say, then, to the archetypal Argentine male.

- To the archetype, all right. But as to the individual, I don't know. It's certainly our duty to try to live up to that archetype.

- Don't we?

- Yes, so Mallea held, because he spoke of the 'invisible Argentine' in the same way that one speaks of the 'Church invisible', which certainly does not mean the different personages of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The invisible Argentine would be a just man, someone who thinks justly above and beyond the call of duty.

- You once told me that around the same time as Mallea. or perhaps earlier, you too thought about this 'stoic sense of life', this exaltation.

- Yes, perhaps it is my Protestant blood. In Protestant countries ethics are stronger, while in Catholic countries it is considered that sins don't matter. You confess, you're absolved, and you go back to committing the same sin. But maybe Ethics is a science that has disappeared in the world. Never mind, we shall have to re-invent it.

- But Protestant ethics seem concerned with economic issues or -

- Sexual matters.

- Well, not nowadays.

- Good heavens, no, not nowadays. I would say just the opposite.

- I feel that your loyalty to this personal order - I won't call it a method but rather a rhythm or even a workable monotony - stems from your childhood and still holds true today.

- I try to keep it that way. I find writing very hard, I'm a very slow writer, but that in itself helps me. Each page, however careless it may seem, is the result of many drafts.

- That's exactly what I'm getting at, the way you take pains.

- I was dictating something the other day, and you will have noticed how I pause at each verb, each adjective, every word. And I also hesitate over the rhythm, the cadence, which to me is the essence of poetry.

- In that case, you are actually thinking of the reader.

- Yes, I believe so.

- So, then, I am right to note this order in your poems, your stories, and your conversation.

- Well, thank you.

- Let's go on to discuss a subject that seems to me has been your greatest preoccupation. I'm talking about time. You've said that the word 'eternity' is inconceivable.

- One of man's ambitions, I think, is the idea of living outside time. But I don't know if it's possible, although twice in my life I have felt a sense of being outside time. Of course, this may have been an illusion on my part. Twice in my long life I have felt outside time - that is, eternal. Obviously I don't know how long the experience lasted because it was outside time. I can't explain it either, but it was a very beautiful experience.

- You're right that eternity is inconceivable. It may be the same with infinity, but that too is inconceivable to us, because if we were able to conceive the immense -

- Well, as regards the infinite, Kant pointed out that we cannot imagine that time may be infinite, but even less can we imagine that time began at one given moment, since if we imagine a second in which time began, that presupposes a previous second, and so on ad infinitum. Now Buddhism holds that each life is determined by the karma woven by the soul in its previous life. But if that is so, we have to believe in infinite time, since each life presupposes a previous life, that life a previous life, and so on for ever. There can be no first life, just as there can be no first moment in time.

- In that case, you could suppose there were some form of eternity.

- No, not of eternity but of an infinite extension of time. I say no because I think eternity is something else. Eternity - I've written about this in a story called 'The Aleph' - is the outside chance that a single moment exists and that in that moment all the past, all our yesterdays, as Shakespeare had it, all the present, and all the future come together. But that would be a divine attribute.

- Which has been called the temporal triad.

- Yes, the temporal triad.

- What I notice is that this sometimes anguished intimacy, this preoccupation of yours, with time has made me feel that whenever you talk about time, time seems to be made flesh. It seems to take a bodily form, to be perceived as a corporal entity.

- Well, in any case, time is more real than we are. Now, it may also be said - and I've often said it - that time is our substance, that we are made of time. It may be that we are not made of flesh and bone; for example, when we dream our physical body does not matter, what matters is our memory and the imaginary events we weave with that memory. And this is obviously temporal, not spatial.

- Right. Now Murena said that the writer should become anachronic - that is, against time.

- That's a splendid idea. Almost all writers try to be contemporary, try to be modern. But that's unnecessary since the fact is that I am immersed in this century, in the preoccupations of this century, I have no need to try to be contemporary. I already am. In the same way, I do not have to try to be Argentine, since I already am. I don't have to try to be blind, since unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately - I am. Murena was right.

- This is interesting because he does not say metachronic, or beyond time, but anachronic, against time. As opposed to, perhaps the journalist or historian.

- Adolfo Bioy Casares and I founded a magazine that lasted - and I do not exaggerate - for three issues and was called Destiempo. And the idea of it was just that - out of step.

- An odd coincidence.

- We didn't know about what Murena had said, but we obviously coincided. The magazine's name gave rise to a predictable and inevitable joke. 'Out of Step ... out of sense, rather!' my friend Néstor Ibarra said, referring to the magazine's contents.

- Murena was talking about time for the artist or writer as being the eternal time of the soul, contrasting it with what he called 'the fallen time of history'.

- Yes, perhaps one of the greatest mistakes, one of the greatest sins, of our century is the importance we give to history. That did not happen in other ages. But now we seem to live as a sort of function of history. In France, where people are very intelligent, very lucid, they love things laid out rationally. There, the writer writes in function of his time and defines himself, for example, as a man from a Catholic background, let us say, born in Brittany, writing after Renán and against Renán. The writer is creating his work for history, as a function of history. In England, on the other hand, it's otherwise; all that is left to literary historians. Of course, as Novalis said, 'Every Englishman is an island.' That is, each Englishman is isolated - in the exact etymological sense of the word 'island' - and so he writes, rather, in function of his imagination, of his memories, or of whatever. And he does not think of his future pigeonholing in the handbooks of literary history.

- But it all connects with what you say. Murena holds that man's enslavement to time has never been worse than at this moment in history, this age.

- It was Spengler who pointed out in The Decline of the West that our age is, first and foremost, historical. He said that people set out to write as a function of history. According to him, a writer can almost foresee the place he will occupy in his country's literary history.

- And what place will you occupy in a historicized age like this, which is so rooted in time?

- The fact is that I too am probably historicized. I mean, by the history of our time.

- Yes, but what place will art and literature occupy in a age such as this?

- Art and literature will have to try and free themselves from time. I have often been told that art depends on politics or history. On the contrary, I think that is quite wrong.

- Of course.

- The famous American painter Whistler was at a party where they were discussing what produces a work of art. Is it, for example, something biological, something environmental, or something topical. Whistler said, 'Art happens.' Meaning, art is a small miracle.

- Absolutely.

- A miracle that somehow escapes that regimented cause and effect of history. Yes, art happens - or doesn't. That doesn't depend on the artist either.

- In spite of all we've just said, we cannot free ourselves from time, because this talk must finish here.