in The Book of Sand
«(...) because neither the book nor the sand has any beginning or end»[1]
On a page in The Book of Sand I saw the most beautiful and harrowing landscape.
While remembering it, I wondered if it was the reproduction of a photograph or of a drawing.
I searched the Image among the endless pages of the book but did not find it.
Perhaps because the book is infinite and one cannot go back to the same page.
Perhaps because I dreamt of it, or read it in a Borges short story.
Perhaps I have never held it in my hands, probably because it is made of sand.
But the Image is real and torments me.
Like the shape that one finds in one cloud, it does not let itself be fixed.
Perhaps because it has appeared to me in a dream, and dreams erode in the morning.
Even though I saw it, memory also betrays me and transforms it every time I want to remember it.
The more I evoke it, the more I imagine it.
If I dreamt of it, the Image is mine alone.
Perhaps the most beautiful I've created.
Perhaps the most important.
Perhaps because it eludes me.
Footnotes
- ^ In BORGES, Jorge Luís. (1983). O Livro de Areia (The Book of Sand). Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, p. 127.