a set of dead symbols … the resurrection of the word … Jorge Luis Borges

Unknown-5“I think Emerson wrote somewhere that a library is a kind of magic cavern that is filled with dead men. And those dead men can be reborn, can be brought back to life when you open their pages.

“…Bishop Berkeley … I remember that he wrote that the taste of the apple is neither the apple itself  – the apple cannot taste itself – nor the mouth of the eater. It requires a contact between them. The same thing happens to a book or a collection of books, a library. For what is a book in itself? A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects.  It is a set of dead symbols. And the the right reader comes along, and the words – or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols – spring to life and we have a resurrection of the word.” Jorge Luis Borges(1899-1986), Argentine poet, writer, translator, critic, This Craft of Verse

as writers it’s all a gift, all grist for the mill …

Unknown-2“A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian poet, short-story writer, essayist and translator, Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Interviews with Roberto Alifano, 1981-1983