When I die, I will not see myself die, for the first time.

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968), an Italian-born writer who spent most of his life in Argentina, is best known for his aphoristic prose-poems collected as "Voces" (Voices). These brief, paradox-leaning statements were composed over many years and published in Spanish in the early 20th century, later gaining wider international attention through translations and the advocacy of writers such as André Breton and others. The quoted line fits Porchia’s characteristic mode: a compact, metaphysical reflection that turns on a logical twist, using the first person to probe identity, self-knowledge, and the limits of experience—especially at the boundary of death.

Porchia’s sentence hinges on the idea that the self is never fully present to itself. We can witness others dying, imagine our own death, and rehearse it in thought, but the moment of dying cannot be experienced as an object of self-observation—because the observing “I” would vanish with it. The paradox (“for the first time”) suggests that even in life we do not truly “see” ourselves; self-knowledge is always indirect, mediated by memory, language, and others’ perceptions. Death becomes the final proof of that estrangement: the ultimate event that happens to “me” but cannot be seen by “me.”