Another Borges excerpt today; this one is from the short story The Circular Ruins, about a mystic who dreams another human into existence, only to finally realize that he himself is the product of someone else’s dream.
It’s just before this — after the narrator’s successful creation of a new life, but before his ultimate realization — that this excerpt picks up. Don’t worry about following along; the story (fittingly) has a dreamlike, hard-to-pin-down style.
His victory and peace became blurred with boredom. In the twilight times of dusk and dawn, he would prostrate himself before the stone figure, perhaps imagining his unreal son carrying out identical rites in other circular ruins downstream; at night he no longer dreamed, or dreamed as any man does. His perceptions of the sounds and forms of the universe became somewhat pallid: his absent son was being nourished by these diminution of his soul. The purpose of his life had been fulfilled; the man remained in a kind of ecstasy. After a certain time, which some chronicles prefer to compute in years and others in decades, two oarsmen awoke him at midnight; he could not see their faces, but they spoke to him of a charmed man in a temple of the North, capable of walking on fire without burning himself. The wizard suddenly remembered the words of the god. He remembered that of all the creatures that people the earth, Fire was the only one who knew his son to be a phantom. This memory, which at first calmed him, ended by tormenting him. He feared lest his son should meditate on this abnormal privilege and by some means find out he was a mere simulacrum. Not to be a man, to be a projection of another man's dreams--what an incomparable humiliation, what madness! Any father is interested in the sons he has procreated (or permitted) out of the mere confusion of happiness; it was natural that the wizard should fear for the future of that son whom he had thought out entrail by entrail, feature by feature, in a thousand and one secret nights.
His misgivings ended abruptly, but not without certain forewarnings. First (after a long drought) a remote cloud, as light as a bird, appeared on a hill; then, toward the South, the sky took on the rose color of leopard's gums; then came clouds of smoke which rusted the metal of the nights; afterwards came the panic-stricken flight of wild animals. For what had happened many centuries before was repeating itself. The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire was destroyed by fire. In a dawn without birds, the wizard saw the concentric fire licking the walls. For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the water, but then he understood that death was coming to crown his old age and absolve him from his labors. He walked toward the sheets of flame. They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.
Just as Borges’ “Library of Babel” made me wonder about infinite worlds, when I read “The Circular Ruins,” I can’t help but think of all the near-infinte cascades of creation in our world.
No, we’re probably not the mere dreams of some meta-dreamer. But we are all the child of another child, stretching back long into prehistory. So too are our ideas the descendents of earlier ideas. Our language the outgrowth of earlier languages.
History won’t end here. More children will be born, more ideas will be developed, more languages will emerge. Look far enough into the past and we would no longer recognzie our progenitors. Look far enough into the future, and we won’t recognize the world to come.
So, it’s in this moment that we find ourselves, serving an ultimately intermediate step in human history. True, it’s not the end. And indeed, we won’t be remembered. But this moment is our home — and it’s not such a bad place to be.