Borges Says You Are the River, Not the Boat

Borges spent years trying to prove that time doesn't exist. He failed, gloriously, and the failure is the point.

His argument goes like this: everything we call "time" is really just a string of separate moments — this one, then this one, then this one — stitched together by memory into something that feels continuous. But the stitching is us. Take away the mind doing the remembering, and there's no thread, just beads scattered on a table. No river. No flow. Just now, and now, and now.

And yet. He wrote this, and then admitted the argument couldn't save him. He still aged. He still grieved. He still felt time gnawing at him like an animal. So he landed somewhere stranger and more comforting than "time is an illusion." He landed on: I am not separate from it.

"Time is the substance I am made of," he wrote. "Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire."

Not a passenger. The current itself. Not prey. The predator too. Not fuel for the flame — the flame.

It doesn't stop time from taking things. But it changes the story you tell about the taking. You're not standing on the bank watching your life get carried off. You're the water. The loss and the living are the same motion.

Some griefs don't need solving. Just a better metaphor to hold them in.

Distilled from The Marginalian