A second read for most of the short stories which left yours truly all the more frustrated because of it: the sharpening of understanding was not improved with repetition. Borges’ circular and often transitive logic forces the reader to a full stop, as we are left to clumsily ponder its meaning. Full enlightenment of his words (much like most abstract religions) requires a life-long philosophical discipline: training our stubborn minds that time and space are malleable surfaces.
Previous favourites from “Labyrinths” remained the same in “Ficciones”: “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “The Babylon Lottery,” “The Secret Miracle”. But a new story “The South” brought fresh horrors to the idea of blending reality with dreams. What is real, if dreams believed to be true suffice? But the maze-like narrative leads the reader to a central idea- a theory of our kind: our need to prescribe order in the face of disorder and we hear echoes of the Anthropic Principle- the observable Universe is because we are able to observe it. Are we not placed here to solve its mysteries? I think Borges would answer that perhaps in other parallel tangents of space and time, we already have.
“…the lottery is an interpolation of chance unto the order of the world and that to accept errors is not to contradict fate but merely to corroborate it.”
– The Babylon Lottery-
“There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. If never says it, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is as untranslatable as music.”
-The End-
JohannaAirth 
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