Time (english translation)

 

 

“Time is a substance I am made of. Time is a river which carries me away, but I am the river.”

Jorge Luis Borges, “A New Refutation of Time” 

English Translation
– Dear Lucian, something intrigues me...
– Tell me, Ignatius... I’m listening.
– Could you, in your own way, expand upon the famous phrase: time passes?
– No... it is man who passes. Yes, it’s a beautiful phrase, isn’t it, Ignatius?
– Yes... “Time passes.” People often say that. As if time were a river, and we, little boats upon it.
– But… no. It is not time that passes — it is us. It is man who passes...
– Through time?
– Yes, but also... and above all, through himself. Time itself does not pass. Time is — it plays.
– Plays? What kind of play?
– As my friend Daniel Sibony says: a play of distances between a before and an after.
What passes is our being, our trace, our breath. Time does not flow; it holds the gap between what is no longer and what is not yet. And it is we who “cross” that gap, who make the passage.
– Are we then playing a game?
– Time, you see, is like an empty stage. It is not the stage that passes, but the actor... the actors. The stage remains; it welcomes.
– Then the world, if I follow what you say, would be a stage?
– You see, what moves is the body, the voice, the gesture, the desire. And when one actor leaves, another enters; the stage is always there.
– No one has left!
– When the actor disappears — that is, when man ceases to play — we say, “time passes.” It’s a rather lazy way of saying that we’re afraid of passing ourselves. We cast onto time our own passing. But the truth is that we pass — and that is good. We are made to pass.
– If I understand correctly, one might say: to pass is to live... therefore, not to pass would be to die?
– Yes... but death is not the opposite of life.
– Then what is it?
– It is the limit that makes life capable of passing. If nothing passed, nothing would be alive.
And when people say, “Time flies, everything fades away,” they are really lamenting their own flight. They do not wish to see that it is we who change, who move, who lose and who find.
– But this passage, this slipping away — I’ve never observed it...
– It is what makes us human. Time is merely a name for that in-between of our passing. You see, time is a symbolic interval between two events, two breaths, two desires.
– Would it then be like a substance that flows?
– Time does not flow; it plays.
– As we do... but where does it play?
– It plays — as we do — between what comes and what goes. And it is up to us to inscribe ourselves there, to play our passage. So yes, time does not pass. Man passes — through time — as one crosses a field, or a dream.
And sometimes, one leaves a trace: a phrase, a gesture, a love — something that continues to play even when one is gone. And perhaps that is the dignity of passing: not to cling to the idea of enduring, but to know how to pass — with style, with presence, with play.
Not to suffer time, but to dance within it.
Time does not pass. Man passes — and in his passing, he opens a little meaning, a little space, a little interval. And then he departs — but the play, that rhythm, remains.

*Daniel Sibony, The Play and the Passage, Seuil