An observer at Iguazu Falls tries to make sense of the inexpressible natural wonder through the texts of Jorge Luis Borges＇s essays and poems. Borges＇s paradoxes of time, immortality, and eternity give meaning to th...An observer at Iguazu Falls tries to make sense of the inexpressible natural wonder through the texts of Jorge Luis Borges＇s essays and poems. Borges＇s paradoxes of time, immortality, and eternity give meaning to the vision, while the natural wonder gives substance to those idealist concepts derived from Berkeley. As a reader of Borges＇s fictions, I yield up my personal identity to an impersonal dreaming consciousness that resembles Berkeley＇s mind as a consciousness sustaining the reality I perceive. Borges writes in his poem ＂Dawning＂ that ＂ideas are not like marble, everlasting, but ever-renewing like a forest or a river＂. The cataracts of Iguazu are both eternal and immortal, eternal in the sense of removing our consciousness of time and confusing past, present, and future in constant repetition, and immortal in the sense of only existing in individual drops of water constantly disappearing and renewing in infinite repetition. The cataracts are perfect emblems of this immortality. The cataracts are time, infinite moments of immortality, moving forward, accelerating, repeating themselves identically, until they achieve a certain eternity, no motion, suspended in time. I am Berkeley＇s Eternal Spirit, the consciousness evoked by Borges in his essay, ＂A New Refutation of Time＂. Distance from the immediate impact of the Falls helps transform fear and horror into sublimity. The closer to the Falls, the more the observer feels fear and anguish at his own insignificance, a fear of annihilation. Aesthetic distance requires an image or word, something that exempts us from immediate contact, and allows us to descend into the whirlpool and come back to the calm surface. The vision evoked in writing and reading fiction is both prior and subsequent to the reading. Our vision of the universe is always inexpressible, a problem of accommodating something overwhelming to the limited schemata we use to grasp existence.展开更多
文摘An observer at Iguazu Falls tries to make sense of the inexpressible natural wonder through the texts of Jorge Luis Borges＇s essays and poems. Borges＇s paradoxes of time, immortality, and eternity give meaning to the vision, while the natural wonder gives substance to those idealist concepts derived from Berkeley. As a reader of Borges＇s fictions, I yield up my personal identity to an impersonal dreaming consciousness that resembles Berkeley＇s mind as a consciousness sustaining the reality I perceive. Borges writes in his poem ＂Dawning＂ that ＂ideas are not like marble, everlasting, but ever-renewing like a forest or a river＂. The cataracts of Iguazu are both eternal and immortal, eternal in the sense of removing our consciousness of time and confusing past, present, and future in constant repetition, and immortal in the sense of only existing in individual drops of water constantly disappearing and renewing in infinite repetition. The cataracts are perfect emblems of this immortality. The cataracts are time, infinite moments of immortality, moving forward, accelerating, repeating themselves identically, until they achieve a certain eternity, no motion, suspended in time. I am Berkeley＇s Eternal Spirit, the consciousness evoked by Borges in his essay, ＂A New Refutation of Time＂. Distance from the immediate impact of the Falls helps transform fear and horror into sublimity. The closer to the Falls, the more the observer feels fear and anguish at his own insignificance, a fear of annihilation. Aesthetic distance requires an image or word, something that exempts us from immediate contact, and allows us to descend into the whirlpool and come back to the calm surface. The vision evoked in writing and reading fiction is both prior and subsequent to the reading. Our vision of the universe is always inexpressible, a problem of accommodating something overwhelming to the limited schemata we use to grasp existence.
