Pierre Menard, a minor French symbolist, produces several chapters of Don Quixote, not copying but recreating them word for word through his own experience. Borges's story is a fake literary essay about a fictional writer, and it changed how we think about authorship and reading. The same words, written centuries later, mean something different. Context is everything. Menard's Quixote is infinitely richer than Cervantes's, being the work of a man who is not Cervantes. The story is a joke and also perfectly serious. It invented a genre. We are all Pierre Menard, rewriting what we read.