Author Jorge Luis Borges on Time and Death

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Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges had an interesting perspective on time and death. He also had an amazing talent and tendency to nail a truth down in one to three sentences. So precise with words was Borges, that he managed to dig deep into the subconscious and pull out values for the ‘real’ world,  using a fictional dream world.

Borges’ work has affected many people and still does to this day. We can see an example of his tendency to leave us baffled in his open-to-interpretation quote below. You can’t help but be surprised at knowing Borges’ “truth,” even if you may not agree with it:

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

Perhaps Borges did not believe in death — his own death, that is (if we assume he is now immortal as his saying professed). If Borges was right, then we must dig deep down inside ourselves, where we will find what we miss; the bridge between life and death, this world and the next.

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It is a scary thought that all men will do and know all things. But no man can do all things and no man can know all things in this world as we generally understand it. However, if we are immortals as Borges claims, then we must face one of the most off-putting and important parts of our existence head-on: the talk on crossing over to the death part of life. We must face the next chapter in our story, including how we manifest immortality through understanding and embracing the bridge we built to cross over from this dimension, to the next.

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

-Jorge Luis Borges

Perhaps we were always immortal. This life may be nothing but a dream, from which we awake into another. Even more of a reason to fear death less and embrace what comes after as something just as lovely as that which came before. It is borderline exciting to entertain the lightness of non-being, as it is unbearable to comprehend the lightness of being.

Related SevenPonds Articles:

• God, Death, Happiness and Misfortune
• “The Dead” by Albert Laighton
  
• Accepting Death While Living Life