Boast of Quietness

Every now and then you stumble upon a piece of writing, a work of such vigor that it dwarfs the customary bubblings of your mind to obscurity. Here's one such wave of astonishing writing, a wonderful blend of peace and openness, of light and shadows, awaiting rediscovery with every reading.

Boast Of Quietness by Jorge Luis Borges -

Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.

The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.

Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them.

Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air. Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.

They speak of humanity.

My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of that same poverty.

They speak of homeland.

My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.

Time is living me.

More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetousmultitude.

They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.

My name is someone and anyone.

I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.

I come back to this time and again. No other piece of writing has struck me so much as this one. Borges with his wealth of invention, creates a world outside time and space. His greatness and the profanity of his writings is indeterminable.

In Borges' own words - " The greatest poetry is always motivated by a writer's sense of that terrible dislocation between the mind and the world; the poem itself rises in that gap, intrusive, begging for consideration, helpless and hopeless, trying to patch over the silence that is always beyond improvement yet somehow unsatisfactory."