Saturday, November 19, 2011

Short Story: "The Garden of Forking Paths"

First of all, I did not really like this story at all. This is mostly because it really did not make any sense and did not have any time travel involved. The first half of the story is talking about a man who decided to spend his life building an 'infinite labyrinth', which turns out to be in the form of a novel. He writes a letter to his descendants and says that it is 'to various futures (not to all).' This means he is talking about the forking of time, which is the possible future’s time may have. This may not be true, just what I got out of it. This idea is very interesting to me. Something that I thought was really cool was when a man is talking about an infinite book. He said the only reason it could be infinite, was by being circular, and having the last page identical to the first. I think that this was really interesting, but it does not have anything to do with time travel. Back to the infinite labyrinth, it is represented by a garden of forking paths, which is all the possible outcomes, all happening, creating forking paths. I think that this is saying that time can be going in many different possible ways. Also, the story talks about time being, "an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times." This again relates to the forking paths and how time is always going and creating new times, in which we may live in one or many of them, but not all, I think. It also says, "Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy." I think that this is a cool idea, kind of talking about alternate dimensions, which I think that it is unlikely to happen. Another intriguing idea is when one guy talks about how around them surrounds invisible humans, all of which exist in different dimensions and are he, and the man he is talking to. This is actually kind of freaky, but also is probably not true. This story was very confusing and did not make a lot of sense. But I did mention the things I got out of it that had to do with the subject of time, even though there was no time travel. The things I did mention, I thought were good ideas but one question I had was, if there are so many dimensions, and we possibly live in more than one, would you remember the one you lived in before?

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