(Roughly) Daily

Further to yesterday’s piece, a dreamy allegory from Jorge Luis Borges: his (very short) story “Ragnarök” in its entirety:

The images in dreams, wrote Coleridge, figure forth the impressions that our intellect would call causes; we do not feel horror because we are haunted by a sphinx, we dream a sphinx in order to explain the horror that we feel.  If that is true, how might a mere chronicling of its forms transmit the stupor, the exultation, the alarms, the dread, and the joy that wove together that night’s dream?  I shall attempt that chronicle, nonetheless; perhaps the fact that the dream consisted of but a single scene may erase or soften the essential difficulty.

The place was the College of Philosophy and Letters; the hour, nightfall.  Everything (as is often the case in dreams) was slightly different; a slight magnification altered things.  We chose authorities; I would speak with Pedro Henríquez Ureña, who in waking life had died many years before.  Suddenly, we were dumbfounded by a great noise of demonstrators or street musicians.  From the Underworld, we heard the cries of humans and animals.  A voice cried: Here they come! and then: The gods! The gods!  Four or five individuals emerged from out of the mob and occupied the dais of the auditorium.  Everyone applauded, weeping; it was the gods, returning after a banishment of many centuries.  Looming larger than life as they stood upon the dais, their heads thrown back and their chests thrust forward, they haughtily received our homage.  One of them was holding a branch (which belonged, no doubt, to the simple botany of dreams); another, with a sweeping gesture, held out a hand that was a claw; one of Janus’ faces looked mistrustfully at Thoth’s curved beak.  Perhaps excited by our applause, one of them, I no longer remember which, burst out in a triumphant, incredibly bitter clucking that was half gargle and half whistle.  From that point on, things changed.

It all began with the suspicion (perhaps exaggerated) that the gods were unable to talk.  Centuries of a feral life of flight had atrophied that part of them which was human; the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome had been implacable with these fugitives.  Beetling brows, yellowed teeth, the sparse beard of a mulatto or a Chinaman, and beastlike dewlaps were testaments to the degeneration of the Olympian line.  The clothes they wore were not those of a decorous and honest poverty, but rather of the criminal luxury of the Underworld’s gambling dens and houses of ill repute.  A carnation bled from a buttonhole; under a tight suitcoat one could discern the outline of a knife.  Suddenly, we felt that they were playing their last trump, that they were cunning, ignorant, and cruel, like aged predators, and that if we allowed ourselves to be swayed by fear or pity, they would wind up destroying us.

We drew our heavy revolvers (suddenly in the dream there were revolvers) and exultantly killed the gods.

“Ragnarök“

* Jorge Luis Borges

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As we confront the return of old monsters, we might send surprising birthday greetings to another master of the short story, William Sydney Porter (better known by his pen name, O. Henry); he was born on this date in 1862. After serving three years in the Ohio Penitentiary for bank fraud and embezzlement (a licensed pharmacist, he had worked in the prison’s infirmary), he turned to what had been a pastime, writing.  Over the next several years he wrote 381 short stories under the pen name by which we know him, “O. Henry,” including a story a week for over a year for the New York World Sunday Magazine.

His wit, characterization, and plot twists– as evidenced in stories like “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Ransom of Red Chief”– were adored by his readers but often panned by critics… though academic opinion has since come around: O. Henry is now considered by many to be America’s answer to Guy de Maupassant.

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