In our upcoming September gathering, we will discuss Jorge Luis Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths," which presents a novel that is also a labyrinth of time. To prepare for this discussion, it is worth looking at how philosophers and physicists have struggled to conceptualize the branching nature of time and choice.
Before the twentieth century, Western philosophy largely treated time as a single, linear highway. The dominant model was Newtonian: time flowed uniformly from the past, through the present, and into the future, and there was only one actual path of events. However, a notable exception was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In the early eighteenth century, Leibniz proposed his theory of "possible worlds." He argued that before the creation of the universe, there existed an infinite number of possible worlds in the mind of God, each representing a different configuration of history. While Leibniz believed that only one of these worlds was actualized, his theory introduced a powerful concept: that reality is surrounded by a dense cloud of parallel possibilities that did not happen, but could have.
Borges took this concept and made it dynamic. In Ts'ui Pên’s labyrinth, time is not a single highway, but a vast, web-like network of divergent and convergent lines. When a character faces a decision, he does not choose one option; he chooses all options simultaneously, creating a branching tree of parallel realities. In 1957, physicist Hugh Everett III would codify this exact literary intuition as the "Many-Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, suggesting that the universe splits at every quantum junction.
This September, we will explore the human implications of this temporal web. We will discuss how viewing time as a branching labyrinth changes our relationship to regret and responsibility. If every decision is a fork that writes a different branch of the universe, our choices carry a weight that linear time can never capture. The garden is not a space of confusion, but a map of our agency.