This week I read for what must have been the fiftieth time Jorge Luis Borges's "Garden of Forking Paths." Like a lot of people on this website, I am an aspiring creative type. When I'm in the heat of a project, I often revisit certain artistic touchstones. They are reminders of what can be done and even guidebooks, if one knows how to read them, on how to do them.

So, knee-deep into a new project, I revisited the Borges and was again dumbstruck. The story is only a little north of four thousand words, yet in that space it manages to make some interesting observations on racial and national identity, to stage a critique of the discourse of history, to meditate on ethical decision making, to tell a gripping story--and then it takes all that and throws into the middle of it a theory of time that anticipates developments in theoretical physics by about a decade and a half (the story having first appeared in 1941).

And the atmosphere of that story--it's like a weeb's wet dream. Listen to this:

"It was under English trees that I meditated on that lost labyrinth: I pictured it perfect and inviolate on the secret summit of a mountain; I pictured its outlines blurred by rice paddies, or underwater; I pictured it as infinite--a labyrinth not of octagonal pavilions and paths that turn back upon themselves, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms... I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars."

It's the kind of image that would quickly turn into camp or caricature if evoked by a less talented writer. Somehow Borges--and this is really his trademark--manages to embed absolutely batshit crazy ideas seamlessly into an otherwise realistic setting. When you step outside after reading Borges, all of a sudden real life looks as crazy as you realize it always has been.

If you do any kind of creative writing (though I hate that term), there's always this weird moment where you shift from reading something you admire to trying to write something of your own. "I have access to all the same words. Why do the words behave so beautifully when he or she uses them and yet so stupidly when I use them?" There's something unsettling about knowing you have everything you need to do something but not being able to do it.