The City of the Immortals

The City of the Immortals

Stairways in and out of my mind

An apple of the blind eye

Four faces all avert their gaze

Guess it all figures in figures -

I was never meant to understand,

The cave dwellers spoke of

Where the heart runs away from the hand

Do the walls hide them or  protect us?

Mirrors that we reflect

Monstrously yoked together!

It all figures in figures

Purposeless ways purposefully wrought

The cave dwellers spoke of

An eternity they forgot

They live for forever

In what eternity would consider a day

And this, this they called reason

"This city, I thought, is so horrific that its mere existence - the mere fact of it having endured, even in the middle of a secret desert - pollutes the past, and the future, and somehow compromises the stars! So long as this city endures no one in the world can ever be happy, or courageous. I do not want to describe it."

- Jorge Luis Borges, The Immortals (The Aleph and Other Short Stories)