Impose upon yourself “a future as irrevocable as the past.”

I spent the day profitably, reading Borges. It struck me that the story “Unworthy” is of a piece with the David Mamet picture “Homicide.” Borges’ Santiago Fischbein, Argentine bookstore proprietor and former street tough, tracks to Mamet’s detective Bobby Gold.

Both are recommended.

To make his horror perfect, Caesar, hemmed about at the foot of a statue by his friends’ impatient knives, discovers among the faces and the blades the face of Marcus Junius Brutus, his ward, perhaps his very son–and so Caesar stops defending himself, and cries out “Et tu, Brute?” Shakespeare and Quevedo record that pathetic cry.

Fate is partial to repetitions, variations, symmetries. Nineteen centuries later, in the southern part of the province of Buenos Aires, a gaucho is set upon by other gauchos, and as he falls he recognizes a godson of his, and says to him in gentle remonstrance and slow surprise (these words must be heard, not read): “Pero, ché!” He dies, but he does not know that he has died so that a scene can be played out again.