Fifth Thursday Literary Lines

Tagged as Poetry

Written on 2007-06-14 15:39:00

I finally got around to reading some Borges last night and he's lovely. Today's excerpt comes from his story The Ethnographer in his collected fictions:

"He must have forseen the difficulties that lay ahead for him; he would have to convince the red men to accept him as one of their own. He set out upon the long adventure. He lived for more than two years on the prairie, sometimes sheltered by adobe walls and sometimes in the open. He rose before dawn, went to bed at sundown, and came to dream in a language that was not that of his fathers. He conditioned his palate to harsh flavors, he covered himself with strange clothing, he forgot his friends and the city, he came to think in a fashion that the logic of his mind rejected. During the first few months of his new education he secretly took notes; later, he tore the notes up - perhaps to avoid drawing suspicion upon himself, perhaps because he no longer needed them."

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