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Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote suggests that our perception of life is merely a distorted reflection of a past that is forever lost.

Borges reflects on the nature of time and memory, proposing a school of thought that views our present existence as a mere shadow or remnants of a reality that has already occurred. This perspective implies that our experiences are not authentic, but rather fragmented recollections of something that we cannot truly grasp, highlighting the elusiveness of time and the subjective nature of human experience.

Themes

TimeMemoryPhilosophyExistenceReflection

In practice

Example use cases

In a philosophical discussion about the nature of reality.

More from Jorge Luis Borges

You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.
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To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.
Jorge Luis BorgesRead
The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables.
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This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.
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A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
Jorge Luis BorgesRead
Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch this declaration of the mastery of God who, with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the night.
Jorge Luis BorgesRead

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