Jorge Luis Borges

To the One Who Is Reading Me

To the One Who Is Reading Me - form Summary

Sonnet Frames Inevitable Mortality

The poem is a sonnet that addresses the reader directly, and its compact fourteen-line form concentrates a philosophical meditation on mortality. The sonnet's tight structure and implied volta sharpen the progression from abstract statements about dust and flux (Heraclitus, Proteus) to a blunt, intimate conclusion about the reader's fate. By compressing cosmic themes into a personal address, the form forces contrast between universal mutability and the appearance of individual invulnerability. The result is a brief, logical-sounding argument whose formal economy intensifies the poem's elegiac, metaphysical effect, consistent with Borges's long engagement with time and identity.

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You are invulnerable. Didn’t they deliver (those forces that control your destiny) the certainty of dust? Couldn’t it be your irreversible time is that river in whose bright mirror Heraclitus read his brevity? A marble slab is saved for you, one you won’t read, already graved with city, epitaph, dates of the dead. And other men are also dreams of time, not hardened bronze, purified gold. They’re dust like you; the universe is Proteus. Shadow, you’ll travel to what waits ahead, the fatal shadow waiting at the rim. Know this: in some way you’re already dead.

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