Guayaquil by Jorge Luis Borges — Read

GuayaquilNow I shall not journey to the Estado Occidental; now I shall not set eyes on snowcapped Higuerota mirrored in the waters of the Golfo Plácido; now I shall not decipher Bolívar's manuscripts in that library, which doubtless has its own shape and its own lengthening shadows but which from here in Buenos Aires I picture in so many different ways.

Rereading the above paragraph preparatory to writing the next, its at once melancholy and pompous tone troubles me. Perhaps one cannot speak of that Caribbean republic without, even from afar, echoing the monumental style of its most famous historian, Captain Joseph Korzeniowski-but in my case there is another reason. My opening paragraph, I suspect, was prompted by the unconscious need to infuse a note of pathos into a slightly painful and rather trivial episode. I shall with all probity recount what happened, and this may enable me to understand it. Furthermore, to confess to a thing is to leave off being an actor in it and to become an onlooker-to become somebody who has seen it and tells it and is no longer the doer.