Something interesting that was brought up in class today was the year in time that the protagonist of the Borges piece experienced in his own mind. Someone brought up the question that if there’s no tangible record of this happening, no witnesses of the work he completed in his mind, did it even happen at all? It hearkens back to the whole “if a tree falls in the middle of the woods and no one hears it, did it fall down at all” question. Do we need a witness for something to be real?
I’m in another literature class right now called Literature of Witness, and as expected, we’re reading works written by primary witnesses — of the Holocaust, of slavery, and of life in prison. The fact that this extra year that the protagonist is granted, supposedly by God, is a “secret” miracle reminds us that the protagonist is our only witness. This brings me to think about the difference between collective testimony vs. personal testimony. In canons of witness, we see a lot of common themes depending on experiences that have been shared by many — individual accounts differ, but patterns often appear. If something happens to just one person, and one person alone, a secondary witness won’t do that experience justice, or even, perhaps, realize what has happened. This gets a little complicated when we bring up the subject of what is “real” and what is not, though. Because if reality is what we perceive, then wouldn’t the act of seeing or hearing the tree fall make the action real? At the same time though, just because I haven’t seen everything with my own eyes doesn’t make its existence unreal to me.
