The Garden of Forking Paths

Photo of Borges at the Hôtel des Beaux Arts where Oscara Wilde died
and where Borges wanted to die as well.

The Garden of Forking Paths (El Jardín de los Senderos que se Bifurcan) was written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941. He is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and without doubt my personal favorite.

In this novel within a novel, the author, Ts'ui Pen had intended to construct an infinite labyrinth, as well as a cryptic letter from Ts'ui Pen himself stating "I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths", Albert realized that the "garden of forking paths" was the novel, and the forking took place in time, not in space. As compared to most fictions, where the character chooses one alternative at each decision point and thereby eliminates all the others, Ts'ui Pen's novel attempted to describe a world where all possible outcomes of an event occur simultaneously, each one itself leading to further proliferations of possibilities. (This idea is remarkably similar to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was not proposed until over a decade after the writing of this story.) Source: Wikipedia


There are other examples of "infinite" or circular books, like the I Ching, which is, if there is ever one, a truly interactive book, in which your personal story gets intertwined, sometimes profoundly modified when we become the object of our own observation. Within the delicate dynamic balance of the cosmos the power of randomness is introduced, opening a window into a uni-verse, of which we are a part, and in which, like the famous butterfly-effect, we must take responsibility for our actions, all of our actions.