🦋 Nostalgia for Earth
A fun passage from the beginning of Borges' lecture "Immortality":
Without understanding [William James'] joke, don Miguel de Unamuno repeats it word for word in his The Tragic Sense of Life*: God is the provider of immortality, but he repeats many times that he wants to go on being don Miguel de Unamuno. Here I don't understand Miguel de Unamuno; I do not want to go on being Jorge Luis Borges, I want to be another person. I hope that my death will be total, I hope to die in body and soul.I do not know if it's ambitious or modest, or at all justifiable, my pretension of speaking about personal immortality, about a soul which preserves a memory of that which was on earth and which already in the other world corresponds to the previous one. I remember that my sister, Norah, was at my house the other day and said: I'm going to paint a picture called "Nostalgia for Earth", having as its content that which an angel feels in heaven, thinking of earth. I'm going to make it up of elements from Buenos Aires when I was a girl.
It's just really nice to see Borges, whom I've always pictured as a sort of forbidding presence, talking in this down-to-earth manner, having a house and a sister...
 Update: fixed a blunder in my translation, after referring to Eliot Weinberger's translation of the lecture in Selected Non-Fictions. * Jaime Nubiola and Izaskun MartÃnez of the Universidad de Navarra have written a paper on Unamuno's Reading of The Varieties of Religious Experience and its Context. Nubiola also has an interesting note in Streams of William James, vol. I, #3 (pdf), on "Jorge Luis Borges and WJ", and in vol. III, #3 (pdf), on "WJ and Borges Again: the Riddle of the Correspondence with Macedonio Fernández". Professor Nubiola has confirmed to me by e-mail that as he understands it, "Unamuno is a deep believer and William James is -- at the end of the day -- a non believer, who understands the belief in God as the other side of the belief of immortality."
posted afternoon of Sunday, February 22nd, 2009
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Well, there's that. But what he's talking about they call in India samsara, keeping going. Death does not release you.
posted morning of February 23rd, 2009 by Randolph
Death does not release you
Does the 'you' that continues to exist after death have the same identity as the 'you' that is living? I don't know a lot about Vedic cosmology but I sort of thought it centered around transmigration of souls? Borges talks about transmigration in this lecture, basically he finds it a much more interesting proposition than to go on being Borges.
posted morning of February 23rd, 2009 by Jeremy
What Borges says here is something I feel most acutely. It's good to hear someone else express it so clearly.
BTW I love the "where you came from" on your sidebar. Can you email me the code? I just added a twitter feed to my own sidebar...
posted evening of February 23rd, 2009 by painterofblue
Yes and no. Beliefs on what survives incarnation vary. Essential identity is preserved for a very long time but personality (and, of course, body) changes between lives. At least the way the Buddhists tell it, though, a soul ultimately gets tired of the physical, and wants to move on.
posted morning of February 25th, 2009 by Randolph
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