Tout ce qui était proche s’éloigne (Everything Near Becomes Distant)

“[…] ‘alles Nahe werde fern,’ everything near becomes distant. Goethe was referring to the evening twilight. Everything near becomes distant. It is true. At nightfall, the things closest to us seem to move away from our eyes. So the visible world has moved away from my eyes, perhaps forever.” Jorge Luis Borges, “Blindnes,” in Seven Nights, New Directions, 1984, p. 1215. In 2006 my friend Xiaoxin caught an eye disease and, from that moment on, began losing his sight. By 2015 he had become completely blind. He told me that this complete darkness frightened him. I felt that my fried was en route somewhere. In the “land of the blind” Xiaoxin will live in a solitary world (a world without simulacra), a real world (we must touch), a poetic world (the collapsed statue)