Okay, now my life is becoming disturbingly weird …… as if I am a character in a short story written by Jorge Luis Borges.
In almost exactly 13 hours the latest episode of “A Peak(e) Behind the Curtain” will be uploaded onto my YouTube channel (Sunday December 21st 2025 at 10 pm GMT). In this I will describe a series of odd events that link me with the great Argentine writer himself.
But a few moments ago I discovered another odd “synchrondipity” to add to the weirdness.
I have been reading the book “Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to his Mind and Art” by Gene H. Bell-Villada. In this I found a reference to a Borges story that was unknown to me. Entitled “The Other Death” it does not appear in any of my anthologies of Borges’ stories.
Today I decided to source a copy on line and quickly found a version published in “The New Yorker” in 1968. As soon as I started reading it I had found yet another fictional story by Borges that mirrored my own (non-fiction) writings regarding conscious perceptions at the point of death.
Below is a link to the article.
Some of you will recall that central to my “Cheating the Ferryman, concept is the bifurcation of human consciousness at the point of death. This split involves the breaking away from the ‘Eidolon”, the everyday awareness that has lived the about-to-end life, of a higher awareness that I call “The Daemon”.
Now read the story and note not only its “itladian” themes but also the name that Borges chose to call the character who relives his past and changes it second time round …..