The Last Person to Hear Your Voice: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds

Once I met Borges in a crowded room with his cane over his arm, led by a friend. He was looking up and a little to the left and seemed to be listening to words from above. One does not inherit courage, he had said in an essay on blindness. His courage had grown as his eyes failed him. I shook his hand, as close as I have ever come to worshiping a human, and he quickly wiped his palm with a white handkerchief. I was asking for only a secondhand blessing but I should have known better than to touch anyone who was having a conversation with God.