Meditações - You had a sense of time that was different from other people’s

In October 1982, 83-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, who at that point had been blind for nearly 30 years, gathered sixty of his closest friends and admirers at a special dinner in New York. Susan Sontag was there. Speaking to a reporter covering the event, she captured the enormity of Borges’s spirit and significance with her signature eloquent precision, saying: 'There is no writer living today who matters more to other writers than Borges. Many people would say he is the greatest living writer … Very few writers of today have not learned from him or imitated him.'

Borges died four years later.

On the 10th anniversary of his death, Sontag revisited her admiration for his work and the enormity of his cultural legacy in a short and beautiful essay titled 'Letter to Borges,' penned on June 13, 1996, and included in the altogether fantastic 2001 collection 'Where the Stress Falls: Essays.'

Sontag begins the letter, the proposition of which she deems not 'too odd' since Borges’s literature has always been 'placed under the sign of eternity,' with a sublime paean to his genius and humility:

You were very much the product of your time, your culture, and yet you knew how to transcend your time, your culture, in ways that seem quite magical. This had something to do with the openness and generosity of your attention. You were the least egocentric, the most transparent of writers, as well as the most artful. It also had something to do with a natural purity of spirit.

You had a sense of time that was different from other people’s. The ordinary ideas of past, present, and future seemed banal under your gaze. You liked to say that every moment of time contains the past and the future, quoting (as I remember) the poet Browning, who wrote something like 'the present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.' That, of course, was part of your modesty: your taste for finding your ideas in the ideas of other writers.'

Sontag also referenced a famous quote of Borges, from "Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Including a Selection of Poems":

A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

Thanks, again, to Maria Popova and The Marginalian.