Jorge Luis Borges Coin 1899-1999

The coin is a silent treasure that I keep in my wallet since 1999, in order to be with me everywhere I go. Some kind of Zahir, as I perceived it. Admitting the course of things, I turned the facts so it wouldn´t happen to me what happened to the man in the story "The Zahir". His obsession for a coin, for The Coin, settled in his mind right after he prefered to lose it somewhere, exactly wanting to forget it... But just to drive him crazy in the end. That´s why I chose to keep this one that came to my hands casually, even when Borges was not to me all that it came to be afterwards...

Just in case. ;-)

Btw, the symbolism the coin holds with its engraved icons is certainly impresive.

Some more about Borges you may want to see:
www.flickr.com/photos/gi/4156320/

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Jorge Luis Borges, from "Borges and I":

"The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I five, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page."