Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen

'So the Platonic Year / Whirls out new right and wrong, / Whirls in the old instead; / All men are dancers and their tread / Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong...'

1919, Yeats

Circular Ruins

Borges' 'The Circular Ruins' diffuses the line between fiction and reality, linearity and circularity, creation and destruction. On one hand, it is a parody of the Genesis, on the creation of man (by another man) and a world that he is thrown into - one that belongs to the dreamer, which we as readers can't quite determine if it's also the world that we know of. On the other hand, it reveals how a dream becomes concretized and interwoven into reality through the act of writing and narrating. Time is linear because there is a sequential time frame for which the man is created; time is circular because at the end of the story, the dreamer realizes that he too, is a figment of another man's imagination, thus bringing the story back to the start when a man decides to create another man.