The people of Tlön are taught that the act of counting modifies the amount counted, turning indefinites into definites. The fact that several persons counting the same quantity come to the same result is for the psychologists of Tlön an example of the association of ideas or of memorization.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left...

Best thing to happen for a poet. A fine death, no? An impressive death.

To think, analyze and invent, he [Pierre Menard] also wrote me, “are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional fulfillment of this function, to treasure ancient thoughts of others, to remember with incredulous amazement that the doctor universal is thought, is to confess our languor or barbarism. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be." (Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, 1939)

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.