Instants – Jorge Luis Borges

If I could live again my life,
in the next, I’ll try
to make more mistakes.
I won’t try to be so perfect.
I’ll be more relaxed.
I’ll be more full than I am now.
In fact, I’ll take fewer things seriously.
I’ll be less hygenic.
I’ll take more risks.
I’ll take more trips.
I’ll watch more sunsets.
I’ll climb more mountains.
I’ll swim more rivers.
I’ll go to more places I’ve never been.
I’ll eat more ice creams and less lima beans.
I’ll have more real problems and less imaginary ones.
I was one of those people who lead
prudent and prolific lives each minute their alive.
Of couse, I had moments of joy but,
if I could go back, I’ll try to have only good moments.

If you don’t know, thats what life is made of.
Don’t lose the now.

I was one of those who never goes anywhere without a thermometer,
without a hot-water bottle,
and without an umberella and without a parachute.

If I could live again, I will travel light.
If I could live again, I’ll try to work bare feet at the beginning of spring till
the end of autumn.
I’ll ride more carts.
I’ll watch more sunrises and play with more children.
If I have the life to live.

Now,I am 85
and I know that I am dying.

Jorge Luis Borges

The History of Night – Jorge Luis Borges

History of the Night

Throughout the course of their generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
thev sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhuastible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.

And to think that she wouldn’t exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.