Through the course of generations <br />men brought the night into being. <br />In the beginning were blindness and dream <br />and thorns which gash the bare foot <br />and fear of wolves. <br />We shall never know who fashioned the word <br />for the interval of darkness <br />which divides the two half-lights. <br />We shall never know in what century it stood <br />for the starry spaces. <br />Others began the myth. <br />They made night mother of the tranquil Fates <br />who weave all destiny <br />and sacrificed black sheep to her <br />and the rooster which announced her end. <br />The Chaldeans gave her twelve houses; <br />infinite worlds, the Stoic Portico. <br />Latin hexameters molded her, <br />and Pascal’s dread. <br />Luis de León saw in her the homeland <br />of his shivering soul. <br />Now we feel her inexhaustible <br />as an old wine <br />and no one can think of her without vertigo, <br />and time has charged her with eternity. <br /> <br />And to think that night would not exist <br />without those tenuous instruments, the eyes. <br /> <br />(translated by Alastair Reid)<br /><br />Jorge Luis Borges<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/history-of-the-night/
