Labyrinths - Jorge Lois Borges

Fact & Fiction
I still haven’t quite acclimatized to Jorge Luis Borges’s works. Once you read the fiction, you will know that the entire story, character and setting are fabled, but you can’t help yourself regarding these stories as real. The artificial world called Tlon, in Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, as a fictitious planet, is too pure to be questioned but at the same time has totally no convictions. I stay in the conflict of reality and fantasy, and fall into the trap which is elaborately organized by the author. The state of flux between fact and fiction gives me a brand-new feeling of reading and also a different way of thinking.

Rules
After reading several works from Labyrinths, I find the Borges sets specific rules in certain fiction, like one lock with one key. Only by reading in the particular way, could the audience understand the real meaning of the article. The game between the writer and the readers will make the readers attach themselves more to the story, and produce deeper influences on them. The key point is the participation.

Elastic Time
In a regular way of thinking, time flows at a constant speed which is usually measured by second, minute, hour and so on in our daily life. Meanwhile, we say “days drag on for year” maybe result from anxiety or worries. After so many years of education in materialism, I have no respect for the true feeling of myself, and just act as a surveyor, who treats the things in a “scientific” way. Why could the time stop for one year for the protagonist in The Secret Miracle? It is made by the God or himself? I know little about religious issues, but I prefer the latter instinctively. Maybe everyone have their own time which flexes in individual way. So I just need to be true to my self.

Pluralism
This is not the first time I met the Parallel Universes, but this is the first time I realize this way of thinking could be brought to my work after reading The Gardens of Forking Paths. Ordinarily, we have a series of process which form a tread in order to achieve an aim. But what if we make the aim not to be a determinate one, then the result will come out to be a net. The architecture may perform in diverse ways with multifarious choices of people, not limited by the designer in a fixed way.

The Opposite
Have you ever tried to assume the character of the opposition of who you are? If you were a murder, describe in the victim’s way; if you were a mother, narrate in the child’s way; if you were a boss, express in the clerk’s way. We should not only put ourselves in someone’s place, but also illustrate the fact, the feeling, and the notion in the opposite. It’s easy to think but difficult to describe, and that means you really put yourself in.

There are still lots of works I can’t quite understand. Read it again some day.