Something to read while I gather myself together

I am currently working on writing up one of our interesting adventures this summer, involving a red Charles River canoe and the Marquette, MI, Coast Guard. Writing about it forces me to relive the trauma, so it may take a while to get the whole story out. In the meantime, I'll give you something else to read.

Gaby and Alejandra have both posted a game where you take the 5th paragraph of page 161 of the book you are reading. Curious, I grabbed the closest at hand to see what came up. This is from a new book of Adolfo Bioy Casares's diary entries and notes about his good friend and collaborator Jorge Luis Borges, titled, aptly, Borges. The book is over 1600 pages long, so I just try to read a few entries a day with no particular goal for finishing. The entry goes as follows:

martes, 8 de mayo [1956] "Despues del almuerzo, la madre de Borges me hace leer una pagina de Borges que se titula "Borges y yo": algo muy sencillo, escrito de una manera llana, triste, noble."

My translation:
Tuesday, May 8th "After lunch, Borges's mother had me read something of his called 'Borges and I': something very simple, written in such a plain, sad, noble way."

The text Bioy is referring to is below, in translation, copied from here. For you Spanish speakers, the original text can be read here.

To the other one, to Borges, is to whom things happen. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and I delay myself, perhaps almost mechanically, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; from Borges I find out through the mail and I see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belong[s] to no-one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, although I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being: the stone eternally wants to be stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books tha[n] in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belong[s] to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.