Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On his religious views, Borges declared himself as an agnostic, clarifying: "Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen"*

It feels kind of strange to quote this after my initial brush with “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins where he refutes an agnostic stance vis-à-vis an atheist one. But I find myself adhering here with Borges. Why to rob an already incomprehensible world of its myriad probabilities?

Perhaps it is not relevant to quote this here with regard to “Labyrinths” which is a distinct work in itself and can be taken as “fantastical literature” encompassing the unimagined. However there also appear to be an underline theme running discreetly for most of the stories in this collection.

Attracted by metaphysics, but accepting no system as true, Borges makes out of all of them a game for the mind. He discovers two tendencies in himself: "one to esteem religious and philosophical ideas for their aesthetic value, and even for what is magical or marvelous in their content. That is perhaps the indication of an essential skepticism. The other is to suppose in advance that the quantity of fables or metaphors of which man's imagination is capable is limited, but that this small number of inventions can be everything to everyone."

These lines from the preface to the work by André Maurois elaborates Borges’ agnostic stand and present to us a glimpse into the author’s mind which seemingly wants to exhaust all the possibilities available to him by using them in different combinations to come to the point that anything is possible. Working with the concept of time and space, myths and dreams Borges continuously constructs labyrinthine worlds whose contemplation is left to the imagination of the reader.

He seems to be postulating that man (also mind, the world or Universe) exists as an infinite entity whose centre is everywhere (an individual), whose circumference is nowhere (existing in infinite series of time). There are numerous references in the work which propose this.

According to André Maurois, Borges sets out to hunt the following metaphor, regarding infinity, through the centuries:

Pascal wrote: "Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere."

And so from an enchanted mind, inspired by the possibility of fiction as reality and vice-versa, is created an array of dreamlike worlds for the readers where readers continuously keep drifting from the boundaries of one to another dazed by the magical images appearing infinitely.

No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.



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* Source: Wikipedia


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