tween a man and a woman who are traveling Europe by train. They have their encounter in York, a medieval town. He is a professor and she is Norwegian. The poem begins and ends with the magical realism or dream-like appearance and perception of reality, all tangled in time and space with only memories as a method of putting some order to the chaos “My story will be faithful to reality, or at least to my personal recollection of reality, which is the same thing” (Borges 418). The intangibility of reality, except for immortality achieved by art, as we will see later in The Mirror and the Mask, is announced at the start of the story by the female feminist heroine “England was our and we lost her—if, that is, anyone can possess anything or anything can really be lost” (Borges 418).
There is a hint in the story that two people, even those in love and the narrator does admit to loving Ulrikke, can only connect so much in a reality that is individually perceived by two different selves “We can go out
...