Jorge Luis Borges, Inferno, I, 32
From the half-light of dawn to the half-light of evening, the eyes of a leopard, in the last years of the twelfth century, looked upon a few wooden boards, some vertical iron bars, some varying men and women, a blank wall, and perhaps a stone gutter littered with dry leaves. The leopard did not know, could not know, that it yearned for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing flesh and a breeze with the scent of deer, but something inside it was suffocating and howling in rebellion, and God spoke to it in a dream: You shall live and die in this prison, so that a man that I have knowledge of may see you a certain number of times and never forget you and put your figure and your symbol into a poem, which has its exact place in the weft of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you shall have given a word to the poem. In the dream, God illuminated the animal's rude understanding and the animal grasped the reasons and accepted its fate, but when it awoke there was only an obscure resignation in it, a powerful ignorance, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of a savage beast.
...
i had a glorious weekend. it was a childhood weekend, a golden age weekend, and also a here-and-there kind of weekend. i was truly happy. does it matter what i did? no, absolutely not. einmal ist keinmal. i was happy then, and that is all. the future may portend happy weekends for me, or it may not; the present tells me that one happy weekend is over; the past holds nothing more for me. this is sufficient. if i have given my all, and if i have been part of a moment, then i am glad. for to be in this moment, this now, one must, perhaps, with deliberate delicacy, reject nostalgic evocations. it is a special balance, that, between the (gritty, ruddy, forcible) present and the (tender, wistful, illusive) past.
it is true that i have followed my own paths in things of love. it is possible that i may have been with somebody earlier (which is not to imply an existing prospective interest) if i had not been so single-minded. it is possible, of course. but love is, for me, nothing like a game, nothing like something i try my hand at. what it is, i think, more or less, it is a matter of destiny. i say this without carelessness, without carelessness absolutely. you must forgive me for not elaborating; there would be much to say (the same-old loves lost and won), and not much value in the retelling. so i say, i would like to be master of my own destiny. now, by that phrase i do not mean a lot of things, for example, i do not mean that destiny has no power over me. contrari-wise (to borrow a term i have seen in Alice in Wonderland), it means merely that i am certainly going to struggle with it, it means merely that i shall refuse to avoid this difficulty.
but my rejoinder, of course, is the titular phrase of this entry, viz, just for once, i'd like to see it. yet, that would be, i think, not treating my philosophise-applications fairly.
