February 23, 2013

The Immortal

In his short story The Immortal, first published in 1947, J. L. Borges shows that those who cannot die cannot live, either: they retreat into a passive state of silence and inactivity.

A strikingly similar reflection appears in Elias Canetti's 1942 diary (published in The Human Province in 1973):
A land of unlimited eternity: one must walk it for days before finding somebody who so much as moves the little finger; the others, in contrast, sit around, silent as the Egyptians.

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