The Witness by Jorge Luis Borges

In a stable lying almost in the shadow of the new stone church, a man with

gray eyes and a gray beard, stretched on the ground amidst the animal

odors, meekly seeks death like someone seeking sleep. The day, faithful to

vast secret laws, continuously displaces and confounds the shadows in the

wretched stable. Outside stretch the tilled fields, a deep ditch filled up with

dead leaves, and the tracks of a wolf in the black mud where the woods

begin. The man sleeps and dreams, forgotten. The bells calling to prayer

awake him. In the kingdoms of England, the sound of the bells is already

one of the customs of the afternoon, but the man, while still a boy, had

seen the face of Woden, had seen holy dread and exultation, had seen the

rude wooden idol weighed down with Roman coins and heavy vestments,

seen the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners. Before dawn he would be

dead and with him would die, never to return, the last firsthand images of

the pagan rites. The world would be poorer when this Saxon was no more.

We may well be astonished by space-filling acts which come to an end

when someone dies, and yet something, or an infinite number of things,

die in each death—unless there is a universal memory, as the theosophists

have conjectured. There was a day in time when the last eyes to see Christ

were closed forever. The battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with

the death of some one man. What will die with me when I die? What

pathetic or frail form will the world lose? Perhaps the voice of Macedonio

Fernandez, the image of a horse in the vacant space at Serrano and

Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?