In Borge’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the majority of the narrative is told through Yu Tsun’s statement on his involvement as a German spy during WWI, while the professor evaluates his situation: he is exposed, he is insignificant; he makes a realization that sets the tone for his entire recollection– “everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me…”

His ancestor Ts’ui Pen’s creation, the Garden of Forking Paths, becomes the setting for Tsun’s ultimate confrontation with the man who is meant to capture him, Richard Madden. He spends what he surmises is his one remaining hour of freedom in the garden with an Englishman named Stephen Albert, and the two spend the time evaluating the innumerable paths provided by time, and Tsun uses his remaining hour to understand. Understand what, I can’t imagine– his narrative is powerful, but it seems like more relatable to magical realist writing or a testament to the horrors of war than an allegory for the “innumerable paths” that compose the internet.

In “The Library of Babel,” the metaphor used to describe the universe (the “library”) as an “an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors.” In both readings, the notion of “limitless” or “unending” labyrinths present a view that tries to describe something almost unfathomable. One of the more interesting ideas forwarded in “The Libray of Babel” centers around the idea that no idea can come into creation that does not already possess some meaning in the library. The internet often seems the same; if you’re looking for something in particular, or you think of something, chances are it already exists in some form there.