Paradoxical Existence

A New Refutation of Time: Borges on the Most Paradoxical Dimension of Existence

"If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer," the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in contemplating our paradoxical experience of time in the early 1930s. "It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change … into time as we know it," Hannah Arendt wrote half a century later in her brilliant inquiry into time, space, and our thinking ego. Time, in other words — particularly our experience of it as a continuity of successive moments — is a cognitive illusion rather than an inherent feature of the universe, a construction of human consciousness and perhaps the very hallmark of human consciousness.

Wedged between Bachelard and Arendt was Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899–June 14, 1986), that muscular wrangler of paradox and grand poet-laureate of time, who addressed this perplexity in his 1946 essay "A New Refutation of Time," /.../