Jorge Luis Borges
In my childhood I was a fervent worshipper of the
tiger--not the jaguar, that spotted "tiger" that
inhabits the floating islands of water hyacinths along
the Parana and the tangled wilderness of the Amazon,
but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can
be faced only by men of war, in a castle atop an
elephant. I would stand for hours on end before one of
the cages at the zoo. I would rank vast encyclopedias
and natural history books by the splendor of their
tigers. (I still remember those pictures, I who cannot
recall without error a woman's brow or smile.) My
childhood outgrown, the tigers and my passion for them
faded, but they are still in my dreams. In that
underground sea or chaos, they still endure. As I
sleep I am drawn into some dream or other, and
suddenly I realize that it's a dream. At those
moments, I often think: This is a dream, a pure
diversion of my will, and since I have unlimited
power, I am going to bring forth a tiger.
Oh, incompetence! My dreams never seen to engender the
creature I so hunger for. The tiger does appear, but
it is all dried up, or it's flimsy-looking, or it has
impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or
it's altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a
dog or bird than like a tiger. ---
