Remorse for Any Death
Remorse for Any Death - meaning Summary
Death as Absolute Absence
Borges presents the dead not as an individual but as death itself: an abstract, limitless absence beyond memory and hope. He compares this condition to the mystic God whose attributes are negated, emphasizing how the living erase the dead’s particulars—places, colors, thoughts—reducing them to ruin. The poem frames mourning as a dispossessing act: survivors parcel out the dead’s days and nights like stolen loot, underlining alienation and loss.
Read Complete AnalysesFree of memory and of hope, limitless, abstract, almost future, the dead man is not a dead man: he is death. Like the God of the mystics, of Whom anything that could be said must be denied, the dead one, alien everywhere, is but the ruin and absence of the world. We rob him of everything, we leave him not so much as a color or syllable: here, the courtyard which his eyes no longer see, there, the sidewalk where his hope lay in wait. Even what we are thinking, he could be thinking; we have divvied up like thieves the booty of nights and days.
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