“The Witness” and its possibilities.

Some thoughts about one of Borges’ most famous “parables”.

For the past year, I have made occasional commentaries on the short stories of Borges that highlighted various themes or references that I found within them that no one I am aware of has previously discussed.

This year, for my second essay of 2025, I have decided to do something a bit different for my exploration of Borges’ works. Rather than commenting on one of his short stories, I shall comment on one of his “parables”, in particular “The Witness”.

It is necessary for me to point out before we go on that Borges’ “Parables” are not exactly parables in the sense that we usually understand the term, as they are not exactly short allegories designed to teach and explain some ethical or philosophical idea, though a few seem to do such a thing. They are more akin to Drabbles or very short essays (much like a Substack note, come to think of it) that concern some philosophical theme expressed through an anecdotal story. Though it may be more accurate to describe the “parables” as anecdotal stories that end with a philosophical statement that relates to the story in some way. This description certainly describes “The Witness”.

It begins with a story of an old man hiding in a barn beside a church who happens to be the very last Saxon who remembers firsthand the practice of his pagan faith, before his people converted to Christianity. He eagerly seeks death, and before dawn his wish is granted. With his death, the last firsthand memories of the Saxon’s pagan rituals are eradicated.

The story concluded, Borges then expands on this last fact. Every time a being dies, some memory that they alone possessed is erased forever. Whether these memories are as significant as the experience of Jesus by the last person who ever saw him or as trivial as Borges’ memory of a bar of sulphur in a drawer, the awareness that an experience will be completely erased with no way to recover it causes a sense of “wonder” in anyone who contemplates this fact. He then thinks about which memories of his will die with him, that are shared with no one else.

Having described “The witness”, I must now do another thing that I haven’t done in my previous Borges commentaries. Rather than discover some hidden theme or reference and bring it out in the open, I intend to simply expand on the theme that is already plain to see.¹

The awareness that not only is memory or experience mortal, but that whenever someone dies they take with them memories shared with no one else or are the last direct experiences of something that no longer exists, a kind of melancholy or existential vertigo is produced whenever this is contemplated long enough. One can apply this awareness to anything in everyday life or history and reveal new areas of wonder, fragility and melancholy in the world.

Think of the past and imagine what it was like to die as the last being to see a living Dinosaur or Thylacine, to hear the ancient Egyptian language or the speech of Napoleon, to have been bored at a gladiator game in the coliseum.

Return to the present and look around, then imagine if you died being the last person who walked through your neighbourhood, who remembers the song you are hearing on the radio, who saw a bird or butterfly that just flew by your window.

Now think of the future and imagine dying as the last being to experience firsthand an airplane flying in the distance or the sound of a car driving beside you, the practice of Christianity or Islam, or seeing a currently ubiquitous animal, maybe even humanity itself.

1. I am going to be a bit dishonest by offering a hidden aspect of “The Witness” anyway, but as a footnote.

As I meditated upon this “Parable” I wondered why it should be arranged that memory and experience should be mortal, in the material universe at least. The answer that I came up with is that if all experiences and memories were to be perpetually preserved in the material world, then more and more of the material world would have to be used to record them, to the detriment of all the world’s other aspects. Furthermore, with so much trivial information clouding what was truly important and essential, how could the material world be conducive to learning and intelligence? It was this last insight that reminded me of a more famous work of Borges that concerned memory, “Funes the memorious”.

The story concerns a young man, Ireneo Funes, who gains perfect eidetic memory after falling off of a horse, and due to remembering everything he experiences perfectly he is unable to think of things in a general way, as he is too overwhelmed and obsessed with the details of everything he remembers. Without the mortality of memory, the material world would become one large and limitless Ireneo Funes.