Nearly every day since I read it many years ago, I think of the Borges story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” I think about how Menard’s version of Quixote would be a radically different book despite containing all the same words. I ponder, as Borges was, what this means for meaning and its continuity.

We can project so much into the future but the future’s past also reaches back to us with a touch we can’t feel but is just as real as this moment. I think Borges might have been then and still now the only person alive to understand what modernity really meant, and what a break with the past it in fact was.