A few years ago, a momentous discovery was made: the 1967 Charles W. Norton lectures of Jorge Luis Borges at Harvard University.   These lectures are a delight, especially “A Poet’s Creed.”  To listen to Borges is to feel for a brief moment what it is like to be someone who is  possessed by a timeless and immortal memory.  What makes a great scholar a wonder—and here I think about someone like Erich Auerbach or Carlo Ginsberg—is the fact that they seem to experience the past as if it were an eternal present.  But listening to the final lecture, it occurred to me how aware Borges was of his memory and the predicament of modern literature.