In his life time, [Herbert Ashe] suffered from unreality, as do so many Englishmen; once dead, he is not even the ghost he was then. He was tall and listless and his tired rectangular beard had once been red. I understand he was a wider, without children. Every few years he would go to England, to visit (I judge from some photographs he showed us) a sundial and a few oaks. He and my father had entered into one of those close (the adjective is excessive) English friendships in that begin by excluding confidences and very soon dispense with dialogue.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, translated by James E. Irby, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings