Connecting Time, Beauty, and Language :: Borger The Secret Miracle Literature Essays

Connecting Time, Beauty, and LanguageOur class has been cerebrate language. People have asked each other, do you think in words? close to have suggested that when we are involved in activities such as deceiver or tennis, we do not think in words, but preferably act from an intuitive space that needs no language. Our class has similarly been pondering prison term. We have reminded each other of a paradox that exists in our everyday lives we cannot be truly in the chip, for as soon as we consciously start trying to be in the bit, we have removed(p) ourselves from the secondment. There is the idea of that nebulous, nameless space proposed in both lines of fancy which begs to be connected. I am led to questions Can we connect metre and language? In other words, can being in the moment in the sense of our perception of fourth dimension mean that we are at long last centered in that wordless space where we act from instinct?I can trace this thread of questioning to a Borges s tory (The abstr call Miracle) that I love wherein a public is sentenced to death by press release squad. He prays to god to be given enough time to clear up his play before he dies, and god freezes time (the shadow of a bee on the stones near his feet remains motionless, and puffs of cigarette smoke from the soldiers mouths hang stabile in the air). The man cannot move, yet he can think. He spends his time (or his out-of-time) working on his play, and when he finally feels it is done, the normal course of time resumes and he is shot to death.While intense experiences of immersion in a moment may not take this form, Borges creates an interesting commentary on the notion of being in the moment. The man is gelid in the moment in most senses of the word, though he is able to think and to use language to define his situation. The idea that I am working with suggests that it is scarcely when we pull back from a moment that we engage with language in order to describe the activities that were, in a sense, timeless only moments before. The man before the firing squad is given the luxury of both the moment and the ability to reflect on it.This raises another interesting question. If time is frozen and no one moves, what kind of scale is the mans mind working on?