I Ask Myself
I Ask Myself - context Summary
Aging, Study, and Old English
Appearing in the collection La Cifra, Borges's sonnet frames a late-life meditation rooted in his longstanding fascination with Old English. Facing advancing age, failing memory and the prospect of blindness, the speaker questions why he continues to study the language of the Angles and Saxons despite diminishing mastery. The poem presents the effort as driven by an inner conviction that the soul transcends death; literary work becomes both consolation and rehearsal for a boundless, inexhaustible universe. Read biographically, it links Borges's intellectual persistence to personal decline and metaphysical belief.
Read Complete AnalysesI ask myself from time to time what reasons move me to study, as my night comes on and with no hope of mastery or precision, the language of the harsh Angles and Saxons. Wasted by the years, my memory keeps letting fall the word repeated in vain, and in much the same way my life goes on weaving and unweaving its weary history. Perhaps (I tell myself) it's that the soul knows in some secret and sufficient way that, destined, as it is, never to die, its vast grave sphere encompasses the whole. Beyond this arduous task, beyond this verse waits, inexhaustible, the universe.
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