“If I could live my life over again, / In the next one I’d try to make more mistakes, / I wouldn’t try to be so perfect, I’d relax more. / I’d be dumber than I’ve been, / In fact I’d take very few things seriously.” This is how the poem Instantes (I’m Worth or I Value) begins, supposedly by Borges, Pablo Neruda or García Márquez, depending on who copies it on the networks, or reads it on radio programs and quotes it in anthologies and self-help books. None of the three great authors wrote it, but it was first published in the American magazine College Humor, in 1935, its author is Don Herold, and the title is “I’d pick more daisies”.
Another mistake is to attribute it to a poetess called Nadine Stair. The text mentions God, and although philosophy and theology are among Borges’s major themes, he was an agnostic.
In addition, the text mixes supposed philosophical premises that are more like advice for having a good time, for which it is enough to go to a travel agency, a bar or a gym.
The supposed poem bears so little resemblance to what Borges captured in his works, essays and stories, that only people who have never read his stories, such as Three Versions of Judas, The Circular Ruins, The Secret Miracle or The Approach to Almotasim, could come to think that he would write this crude self-help decalogue.
Unfortunately, social media lacks the necessary controls to avoid this type of confusion and this text, attributed again and again to poor Jorge Luis Borges, will continue to circulate as “fake news.”
Fragments of an Apocryphal Gospel, a poem that Borges did write, contains these substantially different sentences: “16. There is no commandment that cannot be infringed, and also those that I say and those that the prophets said. 17. He who kills for the cause of justice, or for the cause that he believes to be just, is not guilty” and ends with an irony, an art that Borges also mastered to perfection: “Happy are the happy.” It would be useless to recommend that Internet users verify the sources of what they publish, because great writers and almost all those passionate about good literature write for a world that no longer reads.
