borges borges of heaven and hell "The Inferno of God is not in need of the splendor of fire. When, at the end of things, Judgment Day resounds on the trumpets and the earth opens and yields up its entrails and nations reconstruct themselves from dust to bow down before the unappealable Judgment, eyes then will not see the nine circles within the inverted mountain, nor the pale meadow of perennial asphodels in which the shadow of the archer follows the shadow of the deer, eternally, nor the ridge of fire on the very lowest level of the infernos of the Muslim faith, antedating Adam and the Fall, nor the violence of metals, not even the almost visible blindness of Milton. No fearful labyrinth of threefold iron, no doleful fires of suffering, will oppress the awestruck spirits of the damned. Nor does the far point of the years conceal a secret garden. God does not require -- to celebrate the merits of the good life -- globes of light, concentric theories of thrones and heavenly powers and cherubim, nor the beguiling mirror that is music, nor all the many meanings in a rose, nor the fateful splendor of a single one of his tigers, nor the subtleties of a sunset turning gold in the desert, nor the immemorial, natal taste of water. In God's infinite compass, there are no gardens, no flash of hope, no glint of memory. In the clear glass of a dream, I have glimpsed the Heaven and Hell that lie in wait for us: when Judgment Day sounds in the last trumpets and planet and millennium both disintegrate, and all at once, O Time, all your ephemeral pyramids cease to be, the colors and the lines that trace the past will in the semi-darkness form a face, a sleeping face, faithful, still, unchangeable (the face of the loved one, or, perhaps, your own) and the sheer contemplation of that face -- never-changing, whole, beyond corruption -- will be, for the rejected, an Inferno, and, for the elected, Paradise." 031225 ... curious i'm curious now 031226 ... stork daddy heaven_is 040317 ... oldephebe yeah, i think i stumbled across this one a few years ago while perusing a friends issue of harpers'..some sort of retrospective or something yes the involutuins are quitessentially borgesian 040317 ... oops! that's the involutions are quintessentially borgesian... 040317 ... z the garden of forking paths the library of babel 040318 ... the unusual suspect grapeseed oil 040318 ... Wasandru The_Library_of_Babel = [ 25^1314000 ] possible books. Of all the fictitious places in literature, few have dazzled me as consistently as this library. 061217 what's it to you? who go blather from