dustd

One of the schools of Tlon goes as far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope , that the past has no reality other than a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe -- and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives -- is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens evert three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.
Today, one of the churches of Tlon maintains that a certain pain, a certain tint of yellow, a certain temperature, a certain sound, are the only reality. All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.

Borges