The soul or consciousness, in fact, is nothing but the unity of a sense of self over time, the bare fact that to perceive and then to articulate our perceptions something must connect from this very instant to another, and another after that.

a fabricated continuity of our own design.

Like Kant before him, he also discovered that the conceit of slowing time down to a single frame, honing the moment of an observation to a pure present, destroys the observation itself. The closer we look, the more the present vanishes from our grasp.

It is we who create the problem, Borges realized, by the very way we imagine the race. We attribute to Achilles and to the tortoise (as we do to ourselves and indeed to all objects) a persistence in time and space. When we slice time and space into the infinitesimal chunks that Achilles and the tortoise have to cross, we simultaneously impose on

There is no such thing as a law of nature; we are trapped forever in our subjective impressions, and believing otherwise is pure delusion.

For the one who recalls or perceives must recognize him- or herself along with the memory or perception for the memory or impression to exist at all.

without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.”[26] Like Knutzen staring into the heavens and mistaking the comet he sees there for the one he expected to find, when we believe that our impressions belong to a self, we falsely project an expected unity on a disjointed and random series of impressions.

To have a self, to experience anything at all, required the existence of the vast totality of space around him, of a past preceding him and a future yet to come. And yet that secret, hypothetical object, the inconceivable universe, was destined to remain hypothetical, secret, forever.

Indeed, it would be fair to say that the relationship with Norah had provoked some uncharacteristic writing on Borges’s part. Carlos Mastronardi, a fellow writer and friend, would later recall that for one of the few times in his life Borges seemed to have little desire to be anyone other than himself.