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.
Jorge Luis BorgesRead
We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !
Interpretation
The quote reflects a skepticism towards the idea of progress, suggesting a loss of faith in its value or reality.
Jorge Luis Borges critiques the notion of progress, indicating that society may have reached a point where the belief in advancement is questioned or deemed futile. This sentiment encapsulates a feeling of disillusionment, where the concept of moving forward seems more like a paradox than an achievement.
In practice
In a discussion about societal issues, I might reference Borgesβ quote to emphasize the doubt in our current direction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.
As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.
Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the curves of that porcelain. Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn't shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun.
I think most of us are outsiders. And I think that's good because it makes you question things.
Once you experience Third World poverty, you're really changed forever, if you're at all open to it, because we're all united in our common humanity. And we are so made as to feel something for people who are in pain. It's not possible to be human and to be unaffected by what you see in the third world.
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