English

At the moment when the dreamer understands the nature of his own existence:
« He walked against the shreds of fire. They did not bite his flesh; they caressed him and flooded him without heat and without burning. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was an appearance, that another man was dreaming him. »
To give greater continuity to the passage, one may place this moment within the preceding sentence of the story:
« For many years he had devoted his nights to dreaming a man: he had dreamed him with meticulous integrity and had imposed him upon reality. Little by little he had instructed him in the rites of fire, in the secrets of the world, in the duties of a son and of a man. When the work was completed, he sent him toward the north so that he would never know that he was the phantom of another dream. »
This passage is one of the most famous in Borges because it concentrates a very profound idea: the author may believe that he creates a character, yet that very gesture reveals the possibility that he himself may have been created by another level of reality. Fiction then becomes an infinite structure: dream within dream, author within author, character within character.
Throughout his work this structure appears frequently: the writer suggests that literary creation is a metaphor for the human condition itself. We act as if we were the authors of our own acts, yet there always remains the possibility that we have already been written by a story larger than ourselves.

There exists a deep analogy between reading and traveling, confirmed by the kinship between experience and the words related to passage. The reader crosses invisible thresholds. Each text possesses its own climate, its density, its particular rhythm. To enter a text is to accept that time itself changes its consistency. Some pages slow thought, others accelerate it. Some open vast spaces, others narrow attention to an almost motionless point. This modulation of inner time constitutes one of the deepest forms of the experience of reading.
But what characterizes a true experience is that it does not leave untouched the one who passes through it. After certain readings, the familiar world seems slightly displaced. Things have not changed materially, yet their presence has been altered. A nuance becomes perceptible where there had been only a uniform surface. A relation appears between elements that until then seemed separate. Language itself becomes more sensitive, as if reading had refined the capacity to hear.
This transformation does not arise only from the ideas contained in the text. It comes from direct contact with a form of presence. To read, in this sense, is to enter into relation with a consciousness that is not our own, yet that acts within our own interior space.