Jorge Luis Borges' short story
"The Garden of Forking Paths" describes
an ancient Chinese novel in which all the bifurcations of history occur. |
The theme of
the story is time itself, a realization of the many-worlds interpretation of
quantum mechanics, some fragment of which is presented in the play
Down the Garden Paths
by Meara. |
Here are two examples from "The Garden of Forking Paths." |
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. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves
also proliferate and fork. |
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In the work of Ts'ui Pen, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of
departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive
at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend. |
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The title of Broges' story
The Aleph refers to "the only place
on earth where all places are seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any
confusion or blending." |
In a remarkable paragraph, Borges describes the dizzying
vista afforded him when he saw the Aleph. |
We quote the beginning and end of the
paragraph, but do read the entire story. |
On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small
iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving;
then I realized that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it
bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space
was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing was infinite things, since I
distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw
daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the
center of a black pyramid;" and on and on, until "I saw the Aleph from every point and
angle, and in the Aleph I saw the Earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph
the earth. |
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Borges' Aleph suggests
Leibnitz's monads: each part of the universe
contains the entire universe, hence infinitely many copies of the universe, each
of which contains infinitely many copies of the uiverse, and so on. |
Although he did not phrase it this way, Leibnitz devised a fractal model of the universe, and
Borges' Aleph is a realization of a Leibnitzian monad. |