It should have been posted last Friday...

I found this Borges ‘quotation when reading the number 39 of The Paris Review of 1966. It was an interview to him at his office in the Biblioteca Nacional of Buenos Aires when he was the director of this institution. As it has always happened to me, Borges' texts seem to be written to me. I have always felt personally alluded by those texts. The last several years, I have considered if the circumstances of being involved numerous times in small talks on a number of topics -that I do not want to list here- have limited my already limited writing skills -even the reading, the serious reading time has been affected... and, all of the sudden, Borges again, talking to me, from his blindness, from his library...

"I have known many poets here who have written well—very fine stuff—with delicate moods and so on—but if you talk with them, the only thing they tell you is smutty stories or they speak of politics in the way that everybody does, so that really their writing turns out to be kind of sideshow. They had learned writing in the way that a man might learn to play chess or to play bridge. They were not really poets or writers at all. It was a trick they had learned, and they had learned it thoroughly. They had the whole thing at their finger ends. But most of them—except four or five, I should say—seemed to think of life as having nothing poetic or mysterious about it. They take things for granted. They know that when they have to write, then, well, they have to suddenly become rather sad or ironic."