We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table;
Funes, all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up
a grape vine. He knew by heart the forms of the southern
clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare
them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish
binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the
foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the
Quebracho uprising. These memories were not simple ones;
each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal
sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all
his half-dreams. Two or three times he had reconstructed
a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction
had required a whole day. He told me: "I alone have more
memories than all mankind has probably had since the world
has been the world." And again: "My dreams are like you
people's waking hours." And again, toward dawn: "My memory,
sir, is like a garbage heap." A circle drawn on a blackboard,
a right triangle, a lozenge - all these are forms we can
fully and intuitively grasp. Ireneo could do the same with
the stormy mane of a pony, with a herd of cattle on a hill,
with the changing fire and its innumerable ashes, with the
many faces of a dead man throughout a long wake. I don't
know how many stars he could see in the sky.
- Borges, "Funes the Memorious"
― Josh (Josh), Thursday, 3 October 2002 02:30 (twenty-three years ago)