A Thousand and One Unanimous Nights

"Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche."
"No one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night."
- The Circular Ruins, Jorge Luis Borges

Readers of Borges are unanimous in their curiosity about that choice of adjective. Its author later disowned the word, calling it an example of his early, irresponsible writing and allowing it to be translated as 'encompassing' in some English editions. Yet there is something undeniably enchanting about that word. He had intended it to take its meaning from the Latin roots, so he was referring to a one-souled night. But even if he had recanted his mistake, Borges is much like a father who has no idea how his son will turn out (an apposite analogy given the plot of that story), having stumbled onto a very real phenomenon with 'the unanimous night' - one which is endangered by captivity within our modern metropolis.

Crouching T-Rex, Hidden Raptor

I'd always thought that if I had an intelligent, erudite roommate, we'd either get nothing done, or everything. But the frequency of my bedtime thoughts suggests that we would just keep each other awake with our epiphanies until we both died from lack of sleep.

I've had trouble sleeping pretty much all my life. But what was it that used to occupy my thoughts? There seems to be a K-T boundary, maybe even a Mohorovičić discontinuity, between my present and past selves, somewhere around 3 years ago (ironically these geological terms come from before that boundary, sometime in primary school when I used to love dinosaurs (and yes, that is K for Kretaceous)). I no longer know him. But is he buried and fossilised inside my mind, or was I within his, waiting to be exposed by the erosive processes of time?