In "Vita nuova", Dante tells us that he once listed the names of sixty women in an epistle just so he could secretly slip in Beatrice's name. Borges thinks Dante repeated this melancholy game in the "Comedia"; he suspects that he constructed the best book literature has managed to achieve just to be able to insert a few encounters with the long-lost Beatrice.

The past is always a collection of memories, very precarious memories, because they are never real. On this subject I heard Borges himself say something very beautiful and moving.

I heard Borges say he remembered one evening his father had told him something very sad about memory, he'd said: "I thought I could remember my childhood when I first arrived in Buenos Aires, but now I know I can't, because I think if I remember something, for example, if today I remember something from this morning, I get an image of what I saw this morning. But if tonight I remember that thing from this morning, then what I remember is not the first image I had of that thing, but the first remembered image. And so each time I remember something, I am not really remembering it, but rather I am remembering the last time I remembered it, I am remembering the last memory. So in reality I have absolutely no memories or images of my childhood, of my youth."

A quote from Rilke: "Scale the depths of things; irony will never descend there." And one from Jules Renard: "Irony is humanity's sense of propriety." I'm going to be honest: I think both quotes, debatable though they might seem, are perfect. But the one I like best is my own: "Irony is the highest form of sincerity."