Concerning the Missing Footnotes in "Take It on the Run"

YOUR HUMBLE SERVANT IN ETERNAL EMNITY, BENITO CERENO

Dear Borges Review of Books,

I see that you have published my story Take It On the Run in your Review of Books that does not review books, but you didn’t credit me as the author and left out the VITAL and ENLIGHTENING footnotes, without which the story is a cheap literary parlor trick and not the hidden treatise on THE MEANING OF MUSIC and TIME it is meant to be.

You’re probably the sort of FOOL who thinks Franz Schubert died in 1828! The sort of FOOL who thinks REO Speedwagon was MERELY a rock ‘n’ roll band! The world doesn’t work like you think. The world is not the totality of sound but that in terms of which we HEAR, that which gives music measure and purpose and VALIDITY. REO Speedwagon is WELTBAUER. The colosseum is not a metaphor. Nor the insect. (But even if they were metaphors, you don’t understand the grammar of the metaphor, which is, second of all, MUSICAL. And first of all, SECRET.)

Every true musician calculates the moment of his death, and Schubert made no mistakes. He disappeared out of DUTY to the tense changes of the 19th Century. He understood better than anyone before or since, save Gary Richrath, the consonance of tense and key and the literary FATE OF MAN.

Do not publish this letter. Put back the footnotes. You cannot stop an idea whose time has come.

YOUR HUMBLE SERVANT IN ETERNAL EMNITY,

BENITO CERENO