Jorge Luis Borges on Money (Hat Tip Luke Chawrun)
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This is a brief passage from Jorge Luis Borges’s short story Zahir, which appeared
appeared in his collection Labyrinths:
… I turned back. The dark window told me from a distance that the shop was now
closed. In Belgrano Street I took a cab. Sleepless, obsessed, almost happy, I reflected
that there is nothing less material than money, since any coin whatsoever (let us say a
coin worth twenty centavos) is strictly speaking a repertory of future values. Money is
abstract, I repeated; money is the future tense. It can be an evening in the suburbs, or
music by Brahms, it can be maps, or chess, or coffee, it can be the words of Epictetus
teaching us to despise gold; it is a Proteus more versatile than the one on the isle of
Pharos. It is unforeseeable time, Bergsonian time, not the rigid time of Islam or the
Porch. The determinists deny that there is such a thing in the world as a single possible
act, id est an act that could or could not happen; a coin symbolizes man’s free will. (I did
not suspect that these “thoughts” were an artifice opposed to the Zahir and an initial
form of its demonical influence.) I fell asleep after much brooding, but I dreamed that I
was the coins guarded by a griffon …