June 27, 2026

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the other things I have seen and felt and lived.

Borges said this in his later years as a nearly blind man living in Buenos Aires, reflecting on a life spent reading and writing in the national library where he worked for decades. He had built his identity entirely around the books he could no longer see, the people who had shaped him, and the city he had memorized on foot. For Borges, the self was not a fixed container but an accumulation of encounters, and that idea cuts directly against the modern assumption that you are separate from the people and experiences around you.