What can I hold you with? I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs. I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon. I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honoured in bronze. I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness or humour my life. I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal. I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow-the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities. I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born. I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself. I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
—Jorge Luis Borges, Two English Poems, Verse II, 1934
@sleepychunk · May 26, 2025
