Friday, October 2, 2009

To supplement the earlier post:

"The Captive" by Jorge Luis Borges

This tale, of course, is true.  Frontier life has always attracted me, no doubt because some hundred years ago my grandparents lived among civilization's outposts out on the edge of the Province of Buenos Aires.  Colonel Borges, my grandfather, there held the command of the Northern and Western Frontier until he met his death in 1874.  Additionally, I have always been interested in the strangeness of memory and in the fact that the past is somehow rescued, or saved for us, by it.  De Quincey thought of the human brain as a palimpsest, wherein all our yesterdays, down to the minutest detail, survive; for their release, these yesterdays 0nly await the proper, unsuspected stimulus.  Memory, not the captive, may very well be the real subject of the story.



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