"I" is a dream

Shri Anantasayana Vishnu, Lord Vishnu sleeping on the cosmic serpent, Ananta (Endless), dreaming the world into existence.


I am not even dust. I am a dream
That weaves itself in sleep and wakefulness.
My brother and my father, Captain Cervantes,
Fought nobly on the waters of Lepanto,
Learned Latin and a little Arabic...
That I might be allowed to dream the other
Whose fertile memory will be a part
Of all the days of man, I humbly pray:
My God, my dreamer, keep on dreaming me.


- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 –1986)


Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of Borges: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists."