The Garden of Forking Paths, 1941

 Jorge Luis Borges (Argentinian, 1899-1986) 

"The Garden of Forking Paths," 1941.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7xhC41maIs (first part)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzDOXnS6nec (2nd part)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-V1qJp5Ihg

A short fictional story, written in 1941 (when WWII was going on from 1939 to 1945) but the story is set during WWI (from 1914 to 1918) where time is questioned as being infinite, parallel, convergent, divergent, linear, orderly or chaotic and how a person feels the past, present and future as a personal or/and shared experience. It can be simply described as a "magical thinking" genre. The description of the orderly description of events that occurs simultaneously in the environment, mind and body of the characters of the story and the ability to convey it to the reader that participates in the story as a witness of the events that develop along the reading of it. The reader moves with or accompanies the narrator and main character in his adventure/discovery or goal. 

Fragments of the story: 

• "...a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death."
• "Then I reflected that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present."
• "...in the deserted street, I felt infinitely visible and vulnerable."
• "...I was man enough to bring this adventure to a successful conclusion. From my weakness I drew strength that never left me."
• "The advice about turning always to the left reminded me that such was the common formula for finding the central courtyard of certain labyrinths."
• "...create a maze in which all men would lose themselves."
• "Lost in these imaginary illusions I forgot my destiny....I felt myself cut off from the world, an abstract spectator."
• "Yet he abandoned all to make a book and a labyrinth."
• "The book is a shapeless mass of contradictory rough drafts."
• "The phrase 'to various future times, but not to all' suggested the image of bifurcating in time, not in space...In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others."
• "...all the possible solutions occur, each one being the point of departure for other bifurcations."
• "At that moment I felt within me and around me something invisible and intangible pullulating."
• "...is an enormous guessing game, or parable, in which the subject is time. The rules of the game forbid the use of the word itself. To eliminate a word completely, to refer to it by means of inept phrases and obvious paraphrases, is perhaps the best way of drawing attention to it."
  
• "He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time -- the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries -- embraces every possibility."