Explore "The Babylonian Lottery" by Jorge Luis Borges on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Like everyone in Babylonia, I have been a proconsul, and like everyone a slave; I have known omnipotence, opprobrium and imprisonment. Look; the first finger of my right hand is missing. Look; through this rent in my cloak you can see a scarlet tattoo-mark on my stomach. It is the second sign, Beth. On nights when the moon is full, that letter gives me power over those men whose sign is Ghimel, but it subjects me to those with Aleph, who on moonless nights owe obedience to those with Ghimel. In the dawn twilight I have throttled the sacred bulls, in a cellar, before a black stone. For a whole lunar year I have been pronounced invisible. When I cried out no one answered, I stole bread and they did not behead me. I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks. In a bronze room, before the silent handkerchief of the strangler, hope has not departed from me; in a stream of pleasures panic has not departed. Heraclides Ponticus reports with astonishment that Pythagoras remembered having once been Pyrrhus, and before that Euphorbus, and before that some other person; to recall similar vicissitudes, I have no need to call in death, or to resort to imposture.
This almost appalling variety I owe to an institution that is unknown in other states, or that works there in an imperfect or secretive manner: the lottery. I have never traced its history; I know that the magi cannot agree about it; I know no more about it than a man unskilled in astrology can know about the moon. I belong to a crazy country in which the lottery is an essential part of reality; till to-day, I had never given it any more thought than to the behaviour of the inscrutable gods or of my own heart. Now, far away from Babylonia and its beloved customs, I reflect on the lottery with some astonishment, and remember the blasphemous conjectures that veiled men mutter in the twilight.