I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.
The notion of art as a compromise is a simplification, for no one knows entirely what he is doing. A writer can conceive a fable, Kipling acknowledged, without grasping its moral. He must be true to his imagination, and not to the mere ephemeral circumstances of a supposed ‘reality’.
The years pass and I’ve told this story so many times I no longer know whether I remember it as it was or whether it’s only my words I’m remembering.
I still hold two images of the ranch – the one I brought with me and the one my eyes finally saw.
I reverently fondled the silky volumes of a certain Chinese encyclopaedia whose finely brushed characters seemed to me more mysterious than the spots on a leopard’s skin.
My story will be true to reality or, in any case, to my personal memory of reality, which amounts to the same thing.
Gradual blindness is not a tragedy. It’s like a slow summer dusk.
All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
Instinctively he had already become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one; in London he found the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who on a stage plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other person.
I kept getting close to happiness and have stood in the shadow of suffering.
Science is a finite sphere that grows in infinite space; each new expansion makes it include a larger zone of the unknown, but the unknown is inexhaustable.
Any life, no matter how long or complex it may be, is made up essentially of a single moment – the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
To be not a man, but the projection of another man’s dream- what incomparable humiliation, what vertigo!
What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world?
The acts of madmen exceed the previsions of the sane.
Now that I possess the secret, I could tell it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways. I don’t know how to tell you this, but the secret is beautiful, and science, our science, seems mere frivolity to me now... And anyway, the secret is not as important as the paths that led me to it. Each person has to walk those paths himself.
Being with you or without you is how I measure my time.
Nationalism only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity.
The magnetized mountain and the genie who swore to kill his benefactor are – who would deny it? – marvelous, but not so much more than the morning itself and the mere fact of being.
It will be said that the conclusion no doubt preceded its “proofs.” But what man can content himself with seeking out proofs for a thing that not even he himself believes in, or whose teaching he cares naught for?
And life is, I am sure, made of poetry. Poetry is not alien – poetry is, as we will see, lurking round the corner. It may spring on us at any moment.