What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honoured in bronze:
my father's father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,
bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a cow; my mother's grandfather
--just twentyfour-- heading a charge of three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,
somehow --the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams,
and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe youwith uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
- Jorge Luis Borges (1934)
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honoured in bronze:
my father's father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,
bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a cow; my mother's grandfather
--just twentyfour-- heading a charge of three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,
somehow --the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams,
and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe youwith uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
- Jorge Luis Borges (1934)
