Subject: Common

From: [email-masked] (Bedin)
Date: Sat, 16 Apr 94 10:42:06 EST

Hello,
I've just read your recent post about "Commonplace" I think it's
a great idea and would like to contribute. This piece by Borges
is complete. I read it now and then, and always recommend it. It
is in included in most collections of Jorge Luis Borges' work
but if you need to know..one paperback where it is included is,
"A Personal Anthology" by Jorge Luis Borges  1967 page 178.
Good Luck !  Great Idea!
[email-masked]

The Witness

     by

     Jorge Luis Borges

 In a stable which is almost in the shadow of the new stone
church, a man with grayeyes and gray beard, lying amidst the
odor of the animals, humbly seekd death as one would would seek
sleep. The day, faithful to vast and secret laws, is shifting
and confusing the shadows inside the poor shelter; outside are
the plowed fields and a ditch clogged with dead leaves and the
tracks of a wolf in the black mud where the forests begin. The
man sleeps and dreams, forgotten. He is awakened by the bells
tolling the Angelus. In the kingdoms of England the ringing of
bells is now one of the customs of the evening, but this man, as
a child, has seen the face of Woden, the divine horror and
exultation, the crude wooden idol hung with Roman coins and
heavy clothing, the sacrificing of horses, dogs and prisoners.
Before dawn he will die and with him will die, and never return,
the last immediate images of these pagan rites; the world will
be a little poorer when this Saxon has died.
    Deeds wich populate the dimensions of space and which reach
their end when someone dies may cause us wonderment, but one
thing, or an infinite number of things, dies in every final
agony, unless there is a universal memory as the theosophists
have conjectured.  In time there was a day that extinguished the
last eyes to see Christ; the battle of Junin and the love of
Helen died with the death of a man. What will die with me when I
die, what pathetic or fragile will the world lose? The voice of
Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a red horse in the vacant lot
at Serrano and Charcas, a bar of sulphur in the drawer of a
mahogany desk?

There you go....Good Luck!