Forking paths

"One sentence caught my attention: “I leave to various futures (but not all) my garden of branching paths.” Almost at once, light dawned. The garden of branching paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase 'to various futures (but not all)' conjured up an image of a branching in time, not in space. A re-reading of the book confirmed this theory. In all works of fiction, each time the writer is confronted with choices, he opts for one and discards the rest. In the inextricable Ts'ui Pên, he opts - at one and the same time - for all the alternatives. By so doing, he creates several futures, several times over, and in turn these proliferate and branch off. Hence, his novel's contradictions..........Unlike Newton or Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing and dizzying web of diverging and converging and parallel times. This mesh of times that merge, split apart, break, and for centuries are unaware of each other, embraces all possibilities."


From "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941) by Jorge Luis Borges ,
http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/borges-garden.html