EVERYONE AND NO ONE: A Story
At twenty-something he went off to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself to the habit of feigning that he was somebody . . . .
-- Jorge Luis
Borges, “Everything and Nothing”
The
town was an ocean of faces and noise. He stood in the Strand,
a pack on his back, confounded, and thought, I
am a drop in the surrounding sea. Anonymity was new to him, but this mental
habit was old, inescapable, and often unconscious: the instinctive apprehension
of real things by means, and only by means, of metaphor. The sun was never the
sun, but a hot wench in scarlet taffeta. The moon? A loon’s mournful wail. Thus
his mind was made, or mismade. Yet what in Stratford
had made him conspicuous, peculiar, and strangely wanting could profit him in London. He’d come to the
place where the word-merchants were, to make a virtue of necessity.
He translated himself, at first to a
player named Shakspere. Yet soon
