Welcome back to my channel! In today’s video, I try to unpack Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Garden of Forking Paths”. #borges #multiverse #paralleluniverse #timetravel
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:51 Plot Summary
07:04 The Blurred Lines Between Fiction and Reality
12:46 Presentism VS. Eternalism: Do Past and Future Exist?
18:43 Multiverse, Quantum Mechanics, and Metaphysics
12:44 Forking Paths with a Fixed Destination: Is Time Deterministic?
24:05 Cyclical Time
25:03 Time Is the Essential Mystery
Hello everyone! Welcome back to my channel Today I want to talk about “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges The story actually reminds me of a deepfake video made several years ago of former US President Richard Nixon delivering a speech he never gave in real life
Good evening, my fellow Americans Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come
Will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind Good night This was a speech Nixon actually prepared in case the Apollo 11 mission failed Though fate didn’t call for its delivery half a century later a MIT project brought it to life through Artificial Intelligence
The director of the project said and I quote “Deepfakes can be used for many of the things we already know but also to create alternative histories or have the potential to rewrite history as well” We often believe history is set in stone But what if this concept of alternate realities
Isn’t just the stuff of science fiction? What if our universe is but one thread in a vast tapestry of infinite possibilities? In “The Garden of Forking Paths” Borges creates a labyrinth of time – “a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times.” This fabric of times contains all possibilities
Yu Tsun is a Chinese man living in England working as a German spy during the World War One The story is actually his confession as he awaits execution The first two pages of the confession are missing So, it starts with Yu Tsun describing himself
Hanging up the phone and then recollecting that the voice in Germany on the other end was that of Captain Richard Madden a British officer which means his spy ring has been compromised He believes his conduit Victor Runeberg through whom he was supposed to pass on
The message to Germany about the name of the exact location of a British artillery park has been arrested or murdered and he will be the next So he needs to find a way to get his information to the Germans before Captain Madden arrests him Going through his possessions
Including a revolver with a single bullet he comes up with a plan He checks the telephone book and locates the name of the only person capable of helping him passing on the information Yu Tsun explains he’s not doing this for Germany the barbaric country that has forced him to become a spy
He just wants to prove to his Leader who looks down on the Asians that a yellow man can save his country He heads to the village of Ashgrove but buys a train ticket for a station farther down the line to confuse his enemy
As the train pulls out of the station he sees Captain Madden running down the platform having just missed it The next train will arrive in forty minutes When Yu Tsun disembarks the train some children ask him if he’s going to see Dr. Stephen Albert Without waiting for his answer
They say the house is far away but he’ll find it by turning left at every crossing Yu Tsun realizes that the directions that the children have given him to take every left turn is the advice for getting to the middle of certain kinds of labyrinths He’s thinking of his great-grandfather
Ts’ui Pen who gave up temporal power to write a novel containing more characters than the Hung Lou Meng or Dream of the Red Chamber and to construct a labyrinth in which all men would lose their way However he was murdered by a foreigner 13 years later
And no one could find the labyrinth or understand his novel As Yu Tsun walks he hears distant music drawing him to a pavilion He realizes the music is Chinese He knocks on the door and a man comes out holding a lantern and speaking Chinese The man is Stephen Albert
And he asks Yu Tsun if he has come to see the garden of forking paths “The garden of forking paths” – the term stirs Yu Tsun’s memory as he reveals that’s the garden of his ancestor Ts’ui Pen Albert turns out to be a Sinologist who claims to
have figured out Ts’ui Pen’s labyrinth He said the book and the labyrinth are actually the same thing He shows Yu Tsun a fragment of a letter written by Ts’ui Pen which says: “I leave to several futures (not all) my garden of forking paths.”
Albert explains in most books a character makes a choice but in Ts’ui Pen’s novel the characters choose simultaneously all alternatives In doing so the character creates several futures and the futures will also proliferate and fork Also Albert determines that the word “time” never appears in the novel
Since a riddle can’t have the answer in the question Albert believes The Garden of Forking Paths is a huge riddle whose subject is time And he explains that instead of believing in a singular linear progression of time Ts’ui Pen believed in an infinite series of times a growing dizzying web of divergent
Convergent, and parallel times This is Ts’ui Pen’s image of the universe “In most of those times we do not exist; in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do.” Yu Tsun declares that in all times he is grateful to Albert
But Albert corrects him saying that in one of the countless futures they are enemies Yu Tsun feels the garden is filled with infinite versions of himself and Albert But when he looks again he sees only Captain Madden coming down the path Then as Albert rises and turns his back
Yu Tsun shoots and kills him Yu Tsun is arrested by Madden and sentenced to hang The name of the city where the British artillery park is located is Albert He sees in the newspaper that the city was attacked And the same newspaper also covers the murder of Albert by Yu Tsun
Yu Tsun believes he has successfully got the message through to Germany But he says the Leader does not know and no one can know his “endless contrition” and “weariness.” On the surface “The Garden of Forking Paths” reads like a classic spy thriller But it’s riddled with improbable coincidences
Like the two kids randomly pointing Yu Tsun towards the exact person he needs to find And that person happens to be the only one who deciphers the labyrinth of his ancestor It’s like the whole story is a dream It unfolds as Yu Tsun’s confession but the first two pages are missing
So we jump in right in the middle Just like a dream there’s no clear beginning and things just…happen And the pacing is all over the place One minute Yu Tsun’s racing against the clock the next he’s chatting with a scholar about labyrinths and time
It is as if time bends to Yu Tsun’s mental state So I guess Borges intentionally blurred the lines between reality and fiction just like he did in his many other works In “The Garden of Forking Paths” Yu Tsun’s great-grandfather Ts’ui Pen wanted to write a
Novel with more characters than the “Hung Lu Meng” or “Dream of the Red Chamber” In the first chapter of this Chinese novel the character Zhen Shiyin encounters (in a dream) a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest who guide him to the “Land of Illusion”. The entrance is marked by a couplet that reads:
“When the unreal is taken for the real then the real becomes unreal; Where non-existence is taken for existence then existence becomes non-existence” This is somehow paralleled in The Garden of Forking Paths where we get lost in this labyrinth created by the writer unable to tell which is real and which is unreal
More interestingly, Yu Tsun the protagonist in The Garden of Forking Paths kind of shares a name with a character from “Dream of the Red Chamber” – Jia Yucun In some translated versions Jia Yucun is spelled exactly as Chia Yu-Tsun In Chinese the names Zhen Shiyin and Jia Yucun sound like
“true events concealed” and “false words remained” respectively So could Borges be subtly hinting that Yu Tsun’s narration might not be entirely reliable? And let’s go back to the very beginning of the story It begins with a seemingly straightforward historical reference “On page 242 of The History of The World War
Liddell Hart tells us that an Allied offensive against the Serre-Montauban line (to be mounted by thirteen British divisions backed by one thousand four hundred artillery pieces) had been planned for July 24, 1916 but had to be put off until the morning of the twenty-ninth
Torrential rains (notes Capt. Liddell Hart) were the cause of that delay – a delay that entailed no great consequences as it turns out The statement which follows – dictated, reread, and signed by Dr. Yu Tsun former professor of English in the Hochschule at Tsingtao –
Throws unexpected light on the case The two first pages of the statement are missing” Liddell Hart was a real-life British military historian He did write extensively about war but none of his works were called “The History of the World War” However a passage from Liddell Hart’s book “The Real War”
Bears some resemblance to the one cited in “The Garden of Forking Paths” It reads like this: “The bombardment began on June 24th; the attacked was intended for June 29th but was later postponed until July 1st owing to a momentary break in the weather This postponement made at French request
Involved not only the spreading out of the ammunition over a longer period and consequent loss of intensity but a greater strain on part of the assaulting troops who after being keyed up for the effort had to remain another forty-eight hours in cramped trenches under the exhausting noise
Of their own gunfire and the enemy’s retaliation – conditions made worse by the torrential rain which flooded the trenches.” If we compare the two paragraphs the dates are different and the consequences of the delay are different Liddell was actually saying that the bad weather
Had made a huge difference on the result of the battle It reminds me of the story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” which begins with a fictional encyclopedia with four extra pages than the original one But also I’m thinking what exactly is real and what is unreal?
We often view history as a set of established facts documented in textbooks and historical accounts But is history truly objective? Isn’t it, in essence a collection of narratives or interpretations of past events shaped by the perspectives and biases of those who record them? Yu Tsun’s confession may not be reliable
But the narrator, or the editor of this confession is not 100 percent reliable, either And isn’t Liddell Hart’s supposed account of the World War also simply his personal lens on historical events? Perhaps the “real” story is forever lost as none of us can truly travel back in time
To witness these events firsthand Well, by saying that we cannot travel back in time I tend to regard time as linear as flowing from the past to present to future The passage of time has often been compared to the flight of an arrow and to an ever rolling stream
The 17th century English poet Robert Herrick once wrote “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may old time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today tomorrow will be dying” Standing by the river Chinese philosopher Confucius said “Time passes by like this flowing away day and night”
We tend to perceive space and time as fundamentally different We can navigate space – travel to different locations even explore other planets with the right technology But when it comes to time we are seemingly stuck unable to choose a different point in the timeline This inherent difference shapes
Our understanding of reality A distant location might be inaccessible at present but we acknowledge its existence, nonetheless Time, however, feels more elusive The past seems to have vanished completely while the future remains unformed and uncertain And I think that’s also what Yu Tsun appears to believe at the beginning of the story
Because when he realizes he’ll be arrested and murdered by Captain Madden he contemplates “Despite my deceased father despite my having been a child in a symmetrical garden in Hai Feng – was I, now, about to die? Then I reflected that all things happen to oneself and happen precisely precisely now
Century follows century yet events occur only in the present…” This is what philosophers would call presentism It is the idea that only the present is real The past and the future only exist subjectively The past is memory and the future is prediction It is only the present which exists objectively
Independent of our minds But there are certainly other ways to look at time And time is exactly what the story is playing with Presentism’s opposite is eternalism This philosophical view posits that all moments – past, present, and future – exist equally as real The present doesn’t hold any special privilege
It’s simply the moment we are currently experiencing In this sense both history an tomorrow’s events exist simultaneously even though we cannot interact with them directly Eternalism can also be visualized through the “Block Universe” theory Imagine space as three-dimensional – with length, width, and height
Now, let’s add time as a fourth dimension creating a four-dimensional space-time Time becomes an integral part of the physical structure of the universe If we can step outside this universe and observe it as a whole the past and future would be eternally fixed within this “block”
Existing as long as the universe itself does In Borges’ story as Yu Tsun walks down the road thinking about his great-grandfather’s labyrinth he seems to experience a shift from a presentist to an eternalist perspective “…I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths a maze of mazes a twisting, turning ever-widening labyrinth
That contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars Absorbed in those illusory imaginings I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself for an indefinite while the abstract perceiver of the world It seems that Yu Tsun is no longer just a guy on the run
He’s become someone who can see beyond the limitations of the present moment and see all time at once And the term “the abstract perceiver” suggests a god-like view from outside the block universe Although eternalism may seem like a strange way of thinking about the world
It is somehow supported by the current laws of physics According to Presentism only the present exists objectively But this assumes that the present moment will be the same for everyone That’s Newton’s idea of absolute time which says there’s a single universal clock that keeps the same time for all observers
But Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity challenges this concept Einstein proposes that time isn’t absolute – past, present, and future are all relative to the observer’s frame of reference Think about it this way: defining now for a distant part of the universe can be tricky
Since nothing can travel faster than light any event we observe far away has already happened in its own past by the time we see it And imagine a super-fast spaceship travelling through space close to the speed of light For the astronauts on board time would actually run slower
Compared to people back on Earth This is known as time dilation Furthermore events that appear to happen at the same time for one observer might occur at different times for another in a different frame of reference Therefore time isn’t a separate entity from space
But rather intertwined in the concept of spacetime The familiar “flow of time” we experience in everyday life might just be a subjective perception As Einstein famously wrote to a friend “The past, present and future are only illusion even if stubborn ones” While Einstein explored time through a scientific lens
Borges’ approach leans more towards the philosophical Here’s how Stephen Albert explains Ts’ui Pen’s novel to Yu Tsun: “Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times
That fabric of times that approach one another fork are sinpped off or are simply unknown for centuries contains all possibilities In most of those times we do not exist; in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do”
This concept bears a striking resemblance to the Many-World Interpretation of quantum mechanics which proposes that every “quantum event” splits the universe creating a new branch for each possible outcome However the story was written before this theory became widely known According to Borges himself he got the inspiration from
F.H. Bradley’s “Appearance and Reality” I checked that book and there’s a statement like this: “…in the universe we might have a set of diverse phenomenal successions The events in each of these world of course, be related in time but the series themselves need not have temporal relations to one another
The event, that is, in one need not be after, or before, or together with the events in any other” It’s interesting to learn that science and philosophy or metaphysics, I should say, sometimes overlap But even if it’s true that “time forks, perpetually into countless futures” how can we ever know it
As we are inherently limited to experiencing only one path of the infinite possibilities? Here again Borges employs a God-like perspective Stephen Albert seems to possess a God-like view He claims to understand all the paths even insisting that on one path he and Yu Tsun become enemies
As if he knows that he will be killed by Yu Tsun The description of his appearance further emphasizes this God-like view: “His face, in the vivid circle of the lamp was undoubtedly that of an old man though with something indomitable and even immortal about it”
Yu Tsun also experiences a glimpse of the multiverse After hearing Albert’s explanation he senses “the dewdrenched garden that surrounded the house was saturated infinitely, with invisible persons Those persons were Albert and myself – secret busily at work multiform – in other dimensions of time” Doesn’t that sound like the omniscient God
Sitting outside space-time and observing the past, present and future all at once? Interestingly even though the story presents countless universes with infinite possibilities these paths seem to converge towards the same outcome In Ts’ui Pen’s novel there are two versions of the same battle:
“in the first, an army marches off to a battle through a mountain wilderness; the horror of the rocks and darkness inspires in them a disdain for life and they go on to an easy victory In the second the same army passes through a palace
In which a ball is being held; the brilliant battle seems to them a continuation of the fete and they win it easily” Both paths lead to the same result And this same pattern appears in Yu Tsun’s world as well He imagines that if Richard Madden didn’t miss the train
He’d be in jail or dead However, in his “real” world he ultimately faces imprisonment anyway and is about to die And if we take a closer look at the ending of the story Yu Tsun believes he has successfully transmitted the secret city name to Berlin
Through the murder of Stephen Albert evidenced by the newspaper report of a bombing “yesterday” However, the problem is it is this same newspaper which reports his murder Logistically Berlin wouldn’t have time to receive and decipher his message before the bombing This implies they might have already possessed the information
Ultimately, Yu Tsun’s actions or inactions wouldn’t have changed the outcome Why do the forking paths ultimately lead to the same destination? I guess perpahs the answer lies within the labyrinth itself In Greek mythology the labyrinth is a complex maze designed by Daedalus to imprison the Minotaur
It represents a place of confinement and inescapable twits and turns So I think Borges may be using the labyrinth as a metaphor for our existence within the confines of time and space We may have the illusion of choice yet we all ultimately reach the same destination
There’s another coincidence in the story that I found very interesting Stephen Albert is the only one who understands T’sui Pen’s theory They both dedicated themselves to unravelling the mysteries of time and they happen to share the same destiny – both killed by a stranger
This reminds me of another time theory – cyclical time which sees time as a cycle repeated over and over According to this theory life is a circle You are born as a person then you turn into dust and then generated into something else This concept is reflected in Eastern philosophies
Like Buddhism and Hinduism where samsara represents the cycle of birth, death and rebirth that continues until the stage of Nirvana is achieved According to this theory T’sui Pen and Stephen Albert can be the same person So, which time theory does Borges believe in? Perhaps neither of them has convinced him
As he himself stated in an interview: “I think that time is the one essential mystery Other things may be mysterious… I remember Saint Augustine said: ‘What is time? If nobody asks me I know what it is If I am asked, I am ignorant I do not know
‘ I think that the problem of time is the problem The problem of time involves the problem of ego for after all what is the ego? The ego is the past, the present and also the anticipation of time to come of the future So those two enigmas those two riddles
Are the essential business of philosophy and happily for us they will never be solved so forever we can go on We can go on making guesswork – we will call that guesswork philosophy which is really mere guesswork We will go on weaving theories and being very much amused by them
And then unweaving and taking other new ones” That’s all I got for “The Garden of Forking Paths” I believe you must have different interpretations Please leave me a comment And if there’s another story or book you want me to talk about feel free to let me know
Thank you so much for watching I’ll see you soon!