Momentarily Free

"Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. "I do not know which of us has written this page." --J.L. Borges, "Borges and I" The above passage is an excerpt from one of my favorite philosophical essays, "Borges and I." I like it because it's short! But also because it accurately portrays the relationship between identity and forgetting. Borges describes how the true self operates not through memory,...