Fernando Fontes – Everness

Fernando Fontes – Director for Latin America. IE Business School

Reading:

Everness  (fragment) by Jorge Luis Borges, (1899-1986)

I’m going to read, or more accurately, recite, a fragment from a poem by José Luis Borges, called Everness.
I first read Borges at university, aged 20, and I was hooked from the start, by his prose, as well as his poetry. He was obsessed by the theme of learning, of knowledge, and forgetting. And one of his sentences, which impressed me greatly at that time, was that if knowing is to remember, to ignore is to have forgotten. As a result of this, I continued reading him, and found a poem, which as I said, is called Everness, which begins like this:

One thing alone does not exist – Oblivion.
God, who saves the metal, saves the dross
and stores in his prophetic memory
moons that have still to come, moons that have shone.

Eveything is there. The thousands of reflections
which between the dawn and the twilight
your face has left behind in many mirrors
and those faces it will go on leaving yet.

…

—

Sólo una cosa hay. Es el olvido.
Dios, que salva el metal, salva la escoria
Y cifra en su profética memoria
Las lunas que serán y que han sido.

Ya todo está. Los miles de reflejos,
Que entre los dos crepúsculos del día
Tu rostro fue dejando en los espejos
Y los que irá dejando todavía.

Y todo es una parte del diverso
Cristal de esa memoria, el universo;
No tienen fin sus arduos corredores

Y las puertas se cierran a tu paso,
Sólo del otro lado del ocaso
Verás los Arquetipos y Esplendores.