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Inferno, I, 32 (by Jorge Luis Borges)
From the twilight of day to the twilight of night, a leopard, in the final years of the nineteenth century, saw wooden planks, vertical iron bars, changing men and women, a high wall, and perhaps a stone gutter with dry leaves. He did not know, could not know, that he longed for love, and cruelty, and the hot pleasure of tearing apart, and the wind with the scent of deer. But something in him suffocated and rebelled, and God spoke to him in a dream: “You live and shall die in this prison, so that a man known to me may look upon you a certain number of times and not forget you and set your figure and your symbol in a poem that has its precise place in the weave of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem.” God, in the dream, illuminated the coarseness of the animal, and it understood the reasons and accepted that destiny; yet when it woke there was only in it a dark resignation, a valiant ignorance, because the machine of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of a wild beast.
Years later, Dante was dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as alone as any other man. In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and of his labour; Dante, in wonder, knew at last who he was and what he was, and blessed his bitternesses. Tradition holds that upon waking he felt he had received and lost an infinite thing, something he could never recover, nor even glimpse, because the machine of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.
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