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This is the most confusing text I've ever read. The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges is a great read, though its a never-ending maze to get through.I think that the spy story is a good aspect, but not the main point that the author is trying to make. The part where the spy and Albert were discussing the garden of Ts'ui Pen. It was the concept of time that was extremely appealing. Albert speaks of "An invisible labyrinth of time...the forking in time, not in space." (Borges 577). He goes on saying "In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts'ui Pen, he chooses - simultaneously - all of them" (Borges 578-579). I think this means that in life everyone has predestined paths through which they decide they can take. They make one decision, and go on from there. It's like a series of forks that branch off indefinintly. You travel constantly forward, until you reach the end of your path and die. Sometimes, the forks cross and you can merge with a path previously unavailable to you. In Ts'ui case, he goes on through one path, crosses onto another, and takes that entire course, goes to another, and so on. It's an infinite mobius strip that way. He found a way to live all lives and cross them; to bend the branches or forks, so to speak. He bent the forks into a labyrinth of the same path instead of several. Hence, he chooses all of them. Constantly making left turns, he winds up in the center, which is the beginning again. |
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