Some Reflections on "Things" (by Borges)

In his poem “Things,” Jorge Luis Borges explores, really almost just catalogues, everyday things with daring flatness. There is perhaps an apparent irreverence for the grandiose subjects of much poetry. Or so it could seem. Yet this irreverence and the daring flatness have an edge. What emerges from the poetic images is a deeper philosophical reflection on passing moments of the everyday in a sea of eternity. This complex collage itself reflects Borges’s deep concern with questions of time and human temporality.

“Things”

Jorge Luis Borges

My walking-stick, small change, key-ring,

The docile lock and the belated

Notes my few days left will grant

No time to read, the cards, the table,

A book, in its pages, that pressed

Violet, the leavings of an afternoon

Doubtless unforgettable, forgotten,

The reddened mirror facing to the west

Where burns illusory dawn. Many things,

Files, sills, atlases, wine-glasses, nails,

Which serve us, like unspeaking slaves,

So blind and so mysteriously secret!

They’ll long outlast our oblivion;

And never know that we are gone.

(http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/Borges.htm#_Toc371756324)

The poem fluidly moves from affirmation to reversal. Initially prominent is the seemingly inconsequential list of things (“walking-stick, small change, key-ring, / The docile lock and the belated / Notes,” among other items) and their temporal insignificance (“Doubtless unforgettable, forgotten”). There is attached to the list and implication also the notion of ephemerality: only a “few days left” and “No time to read.” Tempus fugit.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

Yet in the middle of the poem we have odd juxtapositions of images. First, what is the relationship of something “doubtless unforgettable, forgotten”? One would seem to deny the other, and yet the comma in the line links the two images; the asyndeton makes the relationship even closer, a conjunction without the explicitness of it, and therefore just two images side-by-side.

Moreover, and second, there is red light reflected in the mirror to the west “where burns illusory dawn.” Counterintuitive, is it not, to have “dawn” in the “west”? We think of a mirror as reflecting things accurately, although with a reversal itself. Is the west really the east, only inverted in the mirror-image and distorted in human perception? Is this after all an instance of the tendency to take the copy for the reality?  Or is the speaker suggesting something more intertwined between the way in which the west gives way to dawn, and thus to the endless sequence of time sign post signaling and sending another? This dawn, after all, is “illusory.” And so even though the mirror reflects a sunset, the ending of a day, the suggestion is that sight can be deceptive, or that our perception can be corrupt (or corrupting), especially when it comes to understanding the natural markers of time.

The poem moves, then, from the initially apparent inconsequence of the everyday, to the temporal limits of the day, to the curious conjunction of opposites (“doubtless unforgettable, forgotten”), and on still to the questionable accuracy of human perception of the world and time. As the poem concludes, the things “we” take for granted (e.g., “Files, sills, atlases, wine-glasses, nails”), which “serve us like unspeaking slaves,” are nevertheless shown to have a temporal mastery over “us”:

They’ll long outlast our oblivion;

And never know that we are gone.

With the word "us" Borges creates a solidarity, another connection without explicitly naming it, between the poem's speaker and the readers.  We who preside over these “unspeaking slaves” do not abide like them. These “many things” are “so blind;” they do not see in mirrors like “we” do. They will “never know that we are gone.” Is it that they cannot perceive and know as humans, just in terms of bare faculties since they are inanimate? Or is it that their “our oblivion” is so complete that there will be no trace left for them to discern, even if they could? Knowing Borges, it is both.

The poem is daringly flat only in the sense that it seems to be concerned with the mindless thoughts of a person at the end of a day; however, it is delightfully dynamic in pressing, or questioning, the permanence of what seems to matter most relative to what we perceive to matter least. The perspective is of an anticipatory archaeologist. What are the seemingly unimportant artifacts now that may help others later, if at all, to understand what characterized "our" lives and gave them fleeting significance before we were gone?

A powerful irony is that, in doing just this, the poem enriches our lives now by elevating the significance of the “many things” in them as we go from each reddened image in the west to the next.