I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.
Jorge Luis BorgesThe art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.
Jorge Luis BorgesThe gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.โ Mallarmรฉ repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; โtout aboutit en un livre,โ everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmรฉ speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.
Jorge Luis Borges