Validation and Valediction
At the start of one of my favourite tales by that pre-eminent author of short stories, Jorges Luis Borges, there is a phrase which perplexed me when I first read it: the narrator is about the conjure the theme of a work he hopes to write and claims that it ‘already justifies me somehow’. What, I wondered in my late twenties, was meant here by justification.
https://bonaelitterae.wordpress.com/2026/10/23/validation-and-valediction/