Introduction
You often confront moments where reality feels thin, slipping into a dizzying series of mirrors, recurring histories, and fictional worlds that threaten to overtake daily life. You suspect that time is not a straight line, that identity is a shifting illusion, and that books contain the secret architecture of the universe.
Jorge Luis Borges explores these unsettling intuitions in Labyrinths, a collection of fictions, essays, and parables that map an alternate universe of the mind. The universe is an infinite and paradoxical labyrinth of mirrors, texts, and recurrent times where reality and fiction constantly dissolve into one another. You discover that the familiar world is merely a fragile consensus, easily invaded by invented planets, secret libraries, and cyclical destines.
The book takes you on a journey through theoretical fictions and metaphysical paradoxes. You traverse infinite hexagonal galleries, walk through gardens of forking paths, and examine the burdens of absolute memory and endless immortality. You encounter detectives trapped in geometry, writers rewriting history, and theologians wrestling with the face of God.
The following questions guide your path through this labyrinth.
- How do writers create their own ancestors through the act of reading?
- What happens when a completely fictional world slowly replaces physical reality?
- Can time branch into infinite parallel futures instead of flowing linearly?
- What secrets are hidden within an endless library containing every possible book?
- How does the burden of total memory destroy the capacity for abstract thought?
- What are the implications of immortality for human identity and moral urgency?
- In what ways do historical events and political plots imitate deliberate theatrical artifice?
- How can the refutation of time and matter liberate you from historical anxiety?
1. Literary Theory and Precursors
Literary history operates in reverse as much as it moves forward. You discover that major authors do not merely inherit a fixed tradition. They actively invent their own precursors through the specific character of their writing.
Every major writer actively creates their own unique set of precursors through their work.
Franz Kafka initially appeared utterly singular in modern literature. Reading his parables and novels eventually reveals distinct idiosyncratic affinities in earlier texts. Without Kafka's specific influence, these earlier figures would never be read in that particular light.
- Zeno of Elea provides paradoxes that anticipate Kafka's labyrinthine obstacles.
- Han Yu's classical Chinese parables share an identical atmosphere of strange authority.
- Søren Kierkegaard writes religious works marked by the same dizzying isolation.
- Robert Browning composes poetry that explores obscure judgments and divine uncertainty.
Robert Browning's poem Fears and Scruples portrays a man who has never seen his famous friend. The protagonist wonders if that friend might actually be God. This work directly anticipates the theological themes running through Kafka's fiction.
The quality we call Kafkaesque does not exist before Kafka. You create it when you read the past through the lens of the present. Each new original voice modifies our conception of all previous literature.
2. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
A secret society of millionaires invents an entire fictional planet whose idealist metaphysics and systematic order gradually infiltrate and replace the real world.
The Discovery of Uqbar
You start with a stray literary detail in an encyclopedia. Bioy Casares notices that his copy of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia lacks several pages found in a duplicate volume. Volume XLVII contains an article on Uqbar instead of the standard 917 pages. That unique copy totals 921 pages.
Uqbar is an obscure region whose literature refers only to imaginary realms. In that hidden land, a heresiarch famously declared that copulation and mirrors are abhorrent. These acts increase the number of men and spread the sophism of the visible world.
Metaphysics and Language
You encounter a planet where philosophy operates as a branch of fantastic literature. Metaphysicians on Tlön do not seek truth or verisimilitude. They seek astonishment.
Every philosophical system is a dialectical game where all aspects of the universe are subordinated to a single premise. One school denies time entirely. It argues that the future exists only as present hope and the past as present memory.
The languages of Tlön are fundamentally idealist. They lack nouns entirely in the southern hemisphere and rely purely on verbs and adjectives:
- In the southern hemisphere, the Ursprache lacks nouns, utilizing impersonal verbs modified by monosyllabic suffixes.
- In the northern hemisphere, prime units are monosyllabic adjectives combined to form temporary ideal objects.
Instead of saying moon, the northern language uses descriptive combinations like round airy-light on dark. A heresiarch devised the sophism of the nine copper coins to make materialism conceivable through a paradox of object continuity. X loses nine coins on Tuesday. Y finds four on Thursday. Z finds three on Friday. X finds two in his corridor, proving the coins persisted throughout the unobserved intervals.
The Infiltration of Reality
You trace the origin of this colossal fiction to an American ascetic millionaire imbued with nihilism. In 1824, an affiliate of the secret society conferred with Ezra Buckley in Memphis, Tennessee. Buckley proposed inventing not just a country, but an entire fictional planet complete with an encyclopedia. The sole condition was that the project made no pact with Jesus Christ.
Ezra Buckley left his vast fortune to fund the secret creation of the first encyclopedia of Tlön before being poisoned in Baton Rouge in 1828. In 1914, the society delivered the last volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön to its collaborators, numbering approximately 300.
The imaginary world begins to materialize in physical reality. Princess Faucigny Lucinge receives silverware containing a compass with Tlön alphabets. Archaeologists and state prisons successfully utilize the methodical production of hrönir, which are duplicated lost objects created through expectation and suggestion, to interrogate and modify the past. Prison inmates digging after seeing photographs unearth a gold mask, an archaic sword, and clay urns.
Humanity readily submits to the orderly fiction because people crave systematic order over the incomprehensible laws of reality. International press dissemination causes the real world to gradually disintegrate and be replaced by the imaginary planet within a projected timeframe of one hundred years.
3. The Garden of Forking Paths
A Chinese governor constructs an infinite novel and an absolute labyrinth that turns out to be a branching network of divergent, convergent, and parallel times.
The Chinese governor Ts'ui Pên intended to write an infinite novel and construct an absolute labyrinth. You discover that these two ambitious projects turned out to be one and the same entity. Ts'ui Pên resigned his worldly powers and shut himself away for thirteen years in the Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude to create a chaotic work filled with contradictory drafts.
In chapter three of the novel the hero dies, while in chapter four he is alive. All possible outcomes of an event occur simultaneously within this unusual manuscript, forming a vast branching network of divergent, convergent, and parallel times.
The Infinite Novel
The sprawling text of the Lost Encyclopedia shares the same labyrinthine nature as the novel. Every possible narrative thread unfolds side by side without any single resolution.
The Omission of Time
The central theme of Ts'ui Pên's novel is time. You find that the entire book conspicuously omits the word itself through periphrases and metaphors.
Just as a riddle whose answer is chess prohibits the use of the word chess, the author omits the word time. This deliberate absence reflects a universe comprising an infinite series of divergent and convergent times rather than a uniform, absolute Newtonian time.
4. Lotteries, Ruins, and Authors
Human destiny is governed by chance institutions, illusory dreams of creation, and acts of profound literary anachronism.
The Babylonian Lottery
The civic lottery in Babylon evolved from a simple plebeian game of chance into a secret, general, and omnipotent institution governing all aspects of existence. Starting as bone or parchment squares sold by barbers for silver prizes, the system gradually incorporated unfavorable tickets with penalties like fines and imprisonment. Public pressure eventually abolished mercenary sales and made participation general and secret under an absolute ruling Company. Every sixty nights drawings take place in the labyrinths of the god.
A slave stole a crimson ticket that prescribed the burning of his tongue, which forced the masses to demand that everyone participate equally.
The Babylonian lottery eventually incorporated an infinite series of subsidiary drawings to ensure that chance governed every circumstance surrounding a decree. Because it was illogical for chance to dictate a major sentence while leaving secondary details fixed, reformers established infinite cascading drawings where no decision is final and all outcomes branch into further alternatives. Emperor Heliogabalus wrote lots on shells for his guests, giving one ten pounds of gold and another ten flies, dormice, or bears. The Celestial Archetype of the Lottery rules over this intricate structure.
Pierre Menard's Quixote
Pierre Menard did not want to write another Don Quixote, but rather sought to produce original pages that would coincide word for word and line for line with Miguel de Cervantes' text. Menard rejected the simple method of adopting seventeenth-century Spanish identity as too easy, choosing instead to remain Pierre Menard and arrive at the Quixote through his own modern experiences and intellectual background. Three hundred years of complex historical events separate Cervantes and Menard.
Menard completed fragments consisting of the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the first part and a fragment of chapter twenty-two.
Menard's method introduces a revolutionary reading technique based on deliberate anachronism and erroneous attribution. By attributing ancient texts to modern authors or reading older works through the lens of subsequent history, the technique fills standard works with entirely new adventures and pragmatic interpretations. You find examples of this approach in attributing the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or James Joyce. Ars magna generalis and Characteristica universalis help explain his intellectual pursuits.
The Circular Ruins
A mysterious stranger arrives at a burned circular temple with the supernatural purpose of dreaming a complete man and inserting him into reality. The magician spends days and nights sleeping and dreaming through chaotic visions and academic lectures before narrowing his focus to a single student. After an initial catastrophic failure due to insomnia, he successfully constructs a youth limb by limb. The magician spent fourteen lucid nights dreaming a garnet-colored heart before progressing to the skeleton and hair.
Two years were dedicated to revealing the arcana of the universe to his dream child.
The fire god breathes life into the magician's dreamed creation under the condition that the youth be sent to worship at another deserted temple downstream. When the magician implores the statue for help, it reveals that its earthly name is Fire and promises to animate the sleeping phantom so all creatures except Fire and the creator will believe him to be flesh and blood. The magician sent his created son away to another temple after making him completely forget his years of apprenticeship. At the end of his life, when a massive fire destroys his sanctuary, the magician discovers that he is also a mere appearance dreamt by another.
5. The Library of Babel
The universe is an endless library of hexagonal galleries containing every possible permutation of the alphabet, holding every book that can ever be expressed.
You can conceptualize the universe as the Library of Babel. It consists of an unending series of hexagonal rooms. Each room contains five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls. There are thirty-five books of uniform format on each shelf.
- Four hundred and ten pages in each book
- Forty lines on each page
- Some eighty letters in each line
- Twenty-five orthographical symbols used to create all books
These symbols comprise the twenty-two letters of the alphabet, the period, the comma, and the space. Because the Library contains all possible combinations of these elements, it holds every book that can ever be expressed in all languages. You can find future histories, true and false catalogues, and translations of every book in existence.
Librarians travel through the galleries searching for meaning. You might seek the legendary Total Book or your personal Vindications. Fanatical groups attempt to destroy useless volumes or randomly recreate canonical books using dice.
Order within Chaos
Many books in the Library are unreadable cacophonies or meaningless cryptograms. Every possible phonetic combination exists, however, and each is filled with meaning in some secret language. Rather than being strictly linear and chaotic, the universe is unlimited and cyclical.
An eternal traveler would eventually see the exact same volumes repeated in the exact same disorder.
Volumes with seemingly absurd titles like The Combed Thunderclap or Axaxaxas mlö are actually part of the total verbal structures contained within the infinite shelves. You inhabit a Crimson Hexagon that obeys The Order, repeating its contents without change across eternity.
6. Memory, Betrayal, and Theater
Total memory impedes abstract thought, while political betrayals and historical events consciously imitate pre-scripted theatrical performances.
Funes the Memorious
6. Memory, Betrayal, and Theater
Total memory impedes abstract thought, while political betrayals and historical events consciously imitate pre-scripted theatrical performances.
Funes the Memorious
A devastating physical trauma can produce an infallible and permanent memory where every sensory detail, perception, and past event is retained with absolute clarity. After being thrown by a half-tamed horse and left paralyzed, Ireneo Funes experienced a radical shift in consciousness.
His perception and memory became unerringly precise, capturing every leaf, tendril, cloud formation, and bodily sensation without the ability to filter, generalize, or abstract. He lived nineteen years as one in a dream before his accident and died at nineteen years old in 1889 of a lung congestion.
Funes could reconstruct entire days from his past, recall every dream, and effortlessly learn complex languages like Latin, Greek, and English, yet found the richness of perception almost intolerably oppressive.
True abstract thought requires the ability to forget differences and generalize, making total memory an impediment to real intellectual conceptualization. Funes was largely incapable of Platonic sorts of ideas or general categories because every single instance, object, or moment was unique and distinct to him. He even struggled with generic terms like dog because the same dog viewed from the side at one minute differed from itself viewed from the front a minute later.
Funes invented an absurd numbering system where every single number from one upwards was replaced by an entirely distinct and unrelated proper noun or object, reaching the twenty-four-thousand mark in his original system of numbering.
The Shape of the Sword
A man who commits an act of ultimate cowardice and treason against a close comrade may spend the rest of his life carrying the physical and psychological burden of his infamy. During revolutionary struggles, individuals may betray their comrades out of fear or survival instincts, adopting false identities afterward.
An English-accented landowner in Uruguay known as the Englishman from La Colorada confesses to a stranger that the prominent curved scar across his face was carved by his victim as punishment for selling out the Irish republican conspirators.
He spent nine days hiding in the general's enormous house during the struggle before committing his betrayal against the Black and Tans.
The Traitor and the Hero
History and human destiny can consciously imitate literature, transforming real political events into pre-scripted theatrical performances. When an iconic revolutionary leader is discovered to be a traitor to his own cause, a master strategist can orchestrate his public execution as a grand, multi-day theatrical drama modeled on classical tragedies to inspire a national revolt without destroying the movement's morale.
In 1824 Ireland, James Alexander Nolan stages the assassination of the hero Fergus Kilpatrick by plagiarizing plots and lines directly from Shakespeare's Macbeth and Julius Caesar.
The historical events took place after Nolan had translated Shakespeare into Gaelic in 1814. The conspirators gathered on August 2nd, 1924, before the hero was assassinated in a theater box on August 6th, 1924, a plot the narrator envisions on January 3rd, 1944.
7. Geometries of Death and Time
Criminal masterminds construct spatial labyrinths of murder, and condemned writers are granted secret extensions of subjective time to finish their work.
Red Scharlach constructs a deliberate spatial and temporal labyrinth of murders to lure his nemesis Erik Lönnrot to his death. You follow a trail of crimes organized along strict geometric lines.
Scharlach uses a series of three staged or accidental murders occurring on the third of consecutive months to establish an equilateral triangle of crime. He knows Lönnrot will deduce the missing fourth point of the rhombus and walk straight into a trap at the abandoned villa of Triste-le-Roy.
Red Scharlach traps Erik Lönnrot at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, revealing how he orchestrated the whole sequence using a dead heresiologist, an eighteenth-century sect, a compass, and a Greek word. The key dates establish the precise geometrical scheme:
- December third - date of the first murder of Doctor Marcel Yarmolinsky
- January third - date of the second murder of Daniel Simon Azevedo
- February third - date of the third mock murder of Gryphius-Ginzberg
God grants a condemned writer a secret year of subjective time between the firing squad's order and its execution so he can finish his masterpiece.
When Jaromir Hladik faces a Gestapo firing squad in Prague on March 29, he prays for a year to finish his verse drama The Enemies. Just as the final volley is commanded at 8:44, the physical universe freezes. Hladik experiences a complete year in his mind to meticulously rewrite and complete his play before the bullet hits him.
Nils Runeberg proposes shocking heterodox theories arguing that Judas Iscariot acted out of supreme asceticism or that God actually chose to become Judas to achieve ultimate infamy.
Runeberg reasons that since Jesus did not need a human betrayer, Judas's act was preordained and represented a profound sacrifice. He voluntarily chose damnation and the worst of all human sins to mirror the divine sacrifice.
Nils Runeberg publishes Kristus och Judas in 1904 and Den hemlige Frälsaren in 1909 in Lund, arguing that Judas or God Himself assumed the vilest destiny of all to save mankind. Runeberg dies on March 1, 1912, after pushing these radical theological deductions to their absolute limits.
A ubiquitous secret sect scattered across all nations and social classes is united solely by the transmission of a trivial, clandestine rite rather than a sacred book or language.
Members of the sect of the Phoenix, or People of the Secret, are completely indistinguishable from the rest of humanity. Devotees across three continents preserve the secret ritual transmitted generation after generation by the lowest individuals such as slaves, lepers, or beggars, using humble materials like cork, wax, or mud.
8. Immortality, Theology, and Impulse
Immortality erases individuality and urgency, while deep irrational impulses drive humans toward civilization or barbarism across vast cycles of time.
The City of the Immortals
You wander through a complex underground labyrinth until you discover a surreal palace with inverted stairways and dead ends. Marcus Flaminius Rufus encounters the Troglodytes, who turn out to be the ancient Immortals.
The City of the Immortals is a chaotic, irrational monument built by immortal beings who abandoned architecture for pure, silent thought. Homer reveals that the Immortals razed their original city and built this parody of a city as a temple to irrational gods, eventually retreating into total contemplation.
Over an infinite period of time, all possible actions happen to all men, canceling out wit and stolidity. Homer spent a millennium since inventing the Odyssey, and notes that no one is anyone because one single immortal man is all men.
Mortality is what makes human life precious and pathetic, because mortal actions are irretrievable and perilous. You rediscover your mortality on October 4, 1921, when you step ashore from the Patna on the Eritrean coast, taste a spring, and bleed.
Theology and Circular Time
Various heretical sects like the Monotones or Annulars professed that history is a circle and everything repeats. Orthodox theologians vigorously opposed this by arguing that human acts are unique and saved eternally by heaven or hell rather than remade by time.
The heresy of circular time proposes that history repeats in infinite cycles, provoking fierce theological refutations. Sir Thomas Browne wrote about the annihilated Histrionic gospels in 1658.
The theologian Aurelian competes with John of Pannonia to refute the Monotones, leading to a bitter lifelong rivalry and John's eventual execution at the stake on the 26th of October. Aurelian dies in a monastery fire just as John did, and in paradise learns that the orthodox believer and the heretic formed one single person.
Destiny and Impulse
Just as a barbarian can embrace civilization, a civilized person can be swept away by an elemental, secret impulse of the wilderness. Despite offers of rescue, they may prefer the raw freedom and barbarism of the frontier.
Droctulft the Lombard leaves his savage companions during the siege of Ravenna after being struck by the harmonious order of the city's architecture and civilization. He dies defending it, prompting the Ravennese to bury him in a temple with an epitaph praising his shift in allegiance.
The author's grandfather commanded the frontiers of Buenos Aires in 1872 when his grandmother encountered a blond Englishwoman captured by Indians years prior, who forgot her native language and refused rescue to return to her life as a chieftain's wife.
Seemingly opposing human destinies driven by profound irrational impulses are often the obverse and reverse of the same coin. The story of Droctulft defending Ravenna and the story of the captive Englishwoman are fundamentally one single story.
9. Retribution, Obsession, and History
Calculated plots of vengeance, inescapable physical obsessions, and historical determinism reveal the dark underbelly of human action.
Emma Zunz
Emma Zunz works at a textile mill and receives news of her father's death by veronal poisoning in Bagé. She guards a secret since the year 1916 and plots the downfall of Aaron Loewenthal, whom she blames for her father's embezzlement and suicide.
She carries out her plan on a Saturday evening in Almagro and Warnes. She intentionally suffers a degrading encounter at the docks to ensure her account of self-defense and abuse is believable before confronting Loewenthal and shooting him.
The House of Asterion
Asterion lives in complete solitude in a house with infinite doors and no locks. He passes the time through games, meditations, and running through stone galleries of the temple of the Axes.
He accepts the periodic arrival of nine men who fall without him needing to bloody his hands. He believes that his redeemer will eventually arrive and take him away from the endless galleries.
Deutsches Requiem
Otto Dietrich zur Linde was born in Marienburg in the year 1908. He reflects on his ancestry, his intellectual foundations in Schopenhauer and Brahms, and his transition into the Party despite a personal aversion to violence.
Nietzsche and Spengler entered his life in the year 1927. He suffered a leg injury on March first in the year 1939 and later served as subdirector of the concentration camp at Tarnowitz, where he was severe with the poet David Jerusalem before Jerusalem's suicide on March first in the year 1943.
Zur Linde maintains that inflicting suffering was a painful duty to destroy his own compassion. He views the ultimate defeat of the Third Reich as a tragic yet perfect fulfillment of historical necessity.
The Zahir
A commonplace twenty-centavo coin in Buenos Aires bears the date 1929 on its obverse. The narrator receives it in his change following the wake of Clementina Villar.
Julius Barlach published a monograph on the subject in the year 1899. The Zahir is an Islamic concept referring to physical or mental items that possess the terrible property of being completely unforgettable.
You can trace the symptoms of this condition:
- the object gradually consumes your entire consciousness;
- it crowds out all other perceptions until you perceive only the Zahir;
- it drives you toward inevitable madness.
The narrator tries to get rid of the coin by spending it at a wretched little tavern. He attempts to distract himself by writing a tale about the serpent Fafnir and consults a psychiatrist before realizing the obsession is inescapable.
10. Tradition, Metaphors, and Artifice
An author's true patrimony is the entire universe, and universal history can be traced through recurring metaphors and self-referential literary artifice.
You do not need to rely on local color or restricted national themes to write as an Argentine. The preoccupation with domestic markers is an artificial concept. Shakespeare and the authors of the Koran did not limit themselves to native elements to represent their cultures.
In the Koran, which is quintessentially Arabian, there are no camels because camels were simply part of everyday reality rather than a nationalist symbol.
The Fearful Sphere of Pascal
Universal history can be traced through the evolution of a single metaphor. Xenophanes, Parmenides, Hermetic texts, and Nicholas of Cusa described God as an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. For medieval thinkers, this image represented divine omnipresence.
By the seventeenth century, absolute space ceased to be a symbol of liberation. It became a terrifying labyrinth for thinkers like Pascal.
Pascal referred to nature as a fearful sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, expressing the vertigo and solitude of seventeenth-century man in an infinite universe.
Partial Magic in the Quixote
Fictional works that incorporate their own creators or readers as characters blur the boundary between reality and fiction. You might infer that you, the audience, are also fictional. Cervantes achieves this effect by including his own book in Don Quixote's library. His protagonists read the very book they appear in.
Similar self-referential structures appear in several texts:
- Shakespeare's plays;
- the Ramayana;
- the Thousand and One Nights.
In the Thousand and One Nights, on the six hundred and second night, King Shahryar hears the queen narrate the very story of the Thousand and One Nights itself, creating an infinite and circular loop.
Walls, Visions, and Waiting
You see similar symmetrical impulses in historical actions and mystical experiences. Emperor Shih Huang Ti ordered the simultaneous erection of the Great Wall of China and the burning of historical books. These massive operations were magical barriers designed to halt death and time. Emperor Shih Huang Ti ordered his heirs to be designated sequentially as Second Emperor, Third Emperor, and so on to infinity in an attempt to found an immortal dynasty.
A person who achieves total mystical union with the universe transcends individual desires and trivial human fortunes. In the story of Tzinacán, the imprisoned magician decodes the secret divine script written on the skin of a jaguar. Tzinacán perceives the divine formula of fourteen words and forty syllables that would grant him absolute power and immortality, yet refuses to utter it because he no longer remembers his former self.
You also discover that prolonged solitude flattens days into uniformity. Mr. Villari hides from his pursuers under an assumed name in Buenos Aires, stripping his existence down to a simple present. Mr. Villari rents a room at number four thousand four on that street, featuring crimson wallpaper with huge spread-tailed peacocks, and spends his afternoons quietly drinking maté.
11. Idealism, Infinity, and Illusions
Zeno's paradoxes of motion rely on infinite regressions to argue that movement is impossible. Aristotle first communicated and refuted Zeno's arguments.
A pursuer can never overtake the pursued because they must continually cross the remaining halfway points.
Achilles runs ten times faster than the tortoise and gives it a headstart of 10 meters. Through infinite successive fractional distances, the tortoise is never overtaken. Wilhelm Capelle published Die Vorsokratiker in 1935, while 1600 years separated Agrippa from Byron.
George Berkeley's idealism and David Hume's skepticism dissolve both material substance and the spiritual self into a series of fleeting perceptions. Berkeley argued that unperceived matter is unintelligible since things exist only when perceived. Hume extended this to the mind, showing that the self is merely a bundle of successive perceptions without a unifying substance. Philonous spoke in Berkeley's dialogues in 1713, and Schopenhauer published his work in 1819.
By applying idealist arguments against matter and mind, temporal succession and the unified historical chain can be systematically denied.
You can observe how Captain Isidore Suárez deciding the victory of Junin and De Quincey publishing a diatribe in 1824 were not contemporary events when they occurred. They are made contemporary only by later retrospective thought.
The universe is a dream created by humanity's inner divinity, intentionally built with subtle flaws to signal its ultimate falsity. You inhabit a world defined by several features:
- crevices of unreason embedded in durable structures;
- phantasmagorias designed by your inner will;
- perceptions that exist only when perceived;
- a self that is merely a collection of different perceptions.
A leopard imprisoned in a cage in the 13th century suffers so that a man may witness him and place his figure into a poem as part of the universal scheme.
12. Parables of Self and Divine
Humanity has lost the true face of the divine, reducing it to an irrecoverable memory scattered across daily life. You might catch a glimpse of sacred features in ordinary settings.
Humanity has lost the true face of the divine, reducing it to an irrecoverable memory scattered across daily life.
A Jew's profile in the subway or hands giving change at a ticket window might unconsciously repeat the features and wounds of Christ. God can become all of us in these quiet moments.
Ragnarök and The Witness
Ancient gods return after centuries of exile in a dream vision, but their degeneration leads humans to kill them. Centuries of fugitive life have brutalized these deities, making them appear cruel and ignorant.
A dying old man remembers seeing the face of Woden, crude wooden idols, and animal sacrifices in his youth. With his final agony, the last immediate images of these pagan rites die forever from the world.
Borges and I
You may experience a profound split between your private, mortal self and the public literary persona who bears your name. Things happen to the other Borges, the one whose name appears on mailing lists and academic rosters.
- The public Borges writes literature that justifies their existence.
- The private self feels that good pages belong to language and tradition.
- The real person is destined to perish definitively.
Everything and Nothing
William Shakespeare was a man of absolute internal emptiness who played countless roles before asking God to finally be himself. Behind his copious words and fame there was only coldness and a dream dreamt by no one.
Shakespeare persisted for twenty years in his controlled hallucination of playing many men like Caesar and Macbeth. He retired to Stratford to handle loans and petty usury, and wrote an arid will devoid of literature.
10 Key Ideas
- Every major writer actively creates their own unique set of precursors through their work.
- A secret society of millionaires invents an entire fictional planet whose idealist metaphysics and systematic order gradually infiltrate and replace the real world.
- A Chinese governor constructs an infinite novel and an absolute labyrinth that turns out to be a branching network of divergent, convergent, and parallel times.
- The universe is an endless library of hexagonal galleries containing every possible permutation of the alphabet, holding every book that can ever be expressed.
- Total memory impedes abstract thought, while political betrayals and historical events consciously imitate pre-scripted theatrical performances.
- God grants a condemned writer a secret year of subjective time between the firing squad's order and its execution so he can finish his masterpiece.
- Immortality erases individuality and urgency, while deep irrational impulses drive humans toward civilization or barbarism across vast cycles of time.
- Calculated plots of vengeance, inescapable physical obsessions, and historical determinism reveal the dark underbelly of human action.
- Universal history can be traced through the evolution of a single metaphor where God is described as an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
- A profound split exists between your private, mortal self and the public literary persona who bears your name.