Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

bending over him. There is something like a transposition of the two faces. Then: “
O pensó cuando su propia madre le besaba los ojos / lo que habrá sido su beso cuando su padre la cortejaba
.” [“Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes, / Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?”] That is, we move from the image of a dream and death to this other image, which is no less profound, of love. And we have the strange rhyme, such a sweet rhyme: “brood” and “wooed.”
    Here is the beginning of another one of Rossetti’s great sonnets, a poem whose title has been used byPriestley for one of his comedies about time, in which he plays with time—for example,
An Inspector Calls
and
Time and the Conways
. 21 This is the phrase Priestley chose: “I have been here before.” Rossetti says, “
Pero cuándo y dónde no puedo decirlo. / Conozco el pasto más allá de la puerta, / conozco la brusca y dulce fragancia
.” [“But when or how I cannot tell: / I know the grass beyond the door, / The sweet keen smell.”] Then there is something I forget, and then speaking with a woman, he says, “You have been mine before.” Then he says what has happened thousands of times and will happen again, that they will separate, they will die, and then they will be born in another life, “yet never break the chain.” As you know, this is the doctrine of the Stoics, the Pythagoreans,Nietzsche, the idea that universal history repeats itself cyclically. In
The City of God
, SaintAugustine erroneously attributes the idea toPlato, who did not teach it, [and he also] attributes it toPythagoras. He says that Pythagoras would teach it to his students and tell them that this doctrine “that I am teaching you”—it would later be called eternal return—“shows us that this has already happened many times, I myself with this staff in my hand, have explained this to you, and you have listened to me an infinite number of times, and will go on to hear it an infinite number of times from my lips.” I wish I had time to talk about the Scottish philosopher DavidHume, who was the first of the eighteenth century to defend that theory, which seems so fantastical. He says that if the world, the entire universe, is made of a limited number of elements—now we would call them atoms—this number, though incalculable, is not infinite. And so, each moment depends on the moment before. It is enough for one moment to be repeated for all the following ones to be repeated as well. We should take a rather simple image. Let us take the image of a deck of cards, and let us suppose that an immortal person is shuffling them. So, they will be dealt out in different orders. But if time is infinite, there will come a moment when he will deal the ace of
oros
, the two of
oros
, the three of
oros
, etcetera, etcetera. This, of course, is rather simple because it deals with forty elements. But in the universe we can assume there are forty billion upon billions of elements to the forth or the fifth degree, or to whatever we wish. But it is always a finite number. In other words, the time will come when the combinations will repeat themselves, and then each of us will be born again and repeat each of the circumstances of our life. And I will pick up this watch, and I will announce that it is seven o’clock and we will inexorably end our class.
    Now, Dickens says that he had an experience of having already lived a particular moment. According to psychologists, this experience can be simply a moment of tiredness: we perceive the present, but if we are tired, we forget it. Then, when we perceive it fully, there is no abyss of thousands of centuries between one experience and another, but rather the abyss of our distraction. We could say toPythagoras and Rossetti that if we, at a particular moment of our lives, have the sensation of having already lived a particular moment, that moment is not exactly the same as the moment of the previous life. That is, the fact of remembering a previous moment is an argument against that theory. But that is unimportant. The important thing is that Rossetti has written an admirable poem titled, “I HaveBeen Here Before,” and Priestley wrote almost as admirable a play on the same subject: that each of our biographies is a series of trivial circumstances that have already taken place thousands of time and will take place again. 22
    In the next class, we will look at two of Rossetti’s long poems, “The Blessed