I wanted more than anything to bare my soul frankly and entirely to my friend. I would have wished to divest myself of it and leave it throbbing there beside him. We went on talking, discussing, on the verge of saying farewell, until all of a sudden, with an unsuspected firmness of conviction, I understood that this “personality” which we tend to value with such inappropriate excess amounted to nothing. It occurred to me that my life would never justify a full, absolute moment that would contain all the others; they would all be provisional phases, each of them wiping out the past and looking to the future, and that outside of the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were no one.

Jorge Luis Borges; from, I suspect, his letters or diaries, as quoted in Borges: a life by Edwin Williamson, pp89.