Borges e Eliot. Textos que se comunicam.

O fio da fábula

O fio que a mão de Ariadne deixou na mão de Teseu (na outra estava a espada) para que este se aventurasse no labirinto e descobrisse o centro, o homem com cabeça de touro ou, como pretende Dante, o touro com cabeça de homem, e o matasse e pudesse, já executada a proeza, decifrar as redes de pedra e voltar para ela, para o seu amor.
As coisas aconteceram assim. Teseu não podia saber que do outro lado do labirinto estava o outro labirinto, o do tempo, e que num lugar já fixado estava Medeia.
O fio perdeu-se, o labirinto perdeu-se também. Agora nem sequer sabemos se nos rodeia um labirinto, um secreto cosmos ou um caos ocasional. O nosso mais belo dever é imaginar que há um labirinto e um fio. Nunca daremos com o fio; talvez o encontremos e o percamos num acto de fé, num ritmo, no sono, nas palavras que se chamam filosofia ou na mera e simples felicidade. 

Cnossos, 1984.

J. L. Borges in Os Conjurados, 1985.



T.S. Eliot

• And so each venture
  Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
  With shabby equipment always deteriorating
  In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
  Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
  By strength and submission, has already been discovered
  Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
  To emulate —but there is no competition—
  There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
  And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
  That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
  For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. (V)

• Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
  The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
  Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
  Isolated, with no before and after,
  But a lifetime burning in every moment
  And not the lifetime of one man only
  But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. (V)

• Love is most nearly itself
  When here and now cease to matter.
  Old men ought to be explorers
  Here or there does not matter
  We must be still and still moving
  Into another intensity
  For a further union, a deeper communion
  Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
  The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
  Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.