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Ars Poetica by Jorge Luis Borges
To look at the river made of time and water And remember that time is another river,
To know that we are lost like the river And that faces dissolve like water.
To be aware that waking dreams it is not asleep While it is another dream, and that the death
That our flesh goes in fear of is that death Which comes every night and is called sleep.
To see in the day or in the year a symbol Of the days of man and of his years,
To transmute the outrage of the years Into a music, a murmur of voices, and a symbol,
To see in death sleep, and in the sunset A sad gold—such is poetry,
Which is immortal and poor. Poetry returns like the dawn and the sunset.
At times in the evenings a face Looks at us out of the depths of a mirror;
Art should be like that mirror Which reveals to us our own face.
They say that Ulysses, sated with marvels, Wept tears of love at the sight of his Ithaca,
Green and humble. Art is that Ithaca Of green eternity, not of marvels.
It is also like the river with no end That flows and remains and is the mirror of
one same Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
And is another, like the river with no end.