Borges 4 - The Garden of Forking Paths

A couple of things: 1 I think that in the same way the passage about the unreliable narrator in Tlön, Uqbar Orbis, Tertius prompted GW into Severian's POV style, the passage here of the book that is a labyrinth of words lead GW to craft BotNS as a labyrinth. I know this observation might seem trivial. What I mean is that not only tBotNS is a puzzle, with many pieces that you have to put together, but a labyrinth. What I am refering to? I am saying that, in contrast with a puzzle, not all pieces are intended to fit. I mean that there are pieces (textual clues) that are deliberately placed to disorient you, to lead you astray. In a labyrinth you also have to construct, to build, dead ends. Threads of reasoning that lead you nowhere. I think this is important, because we are trying to make sense of everything, of every little detail, and maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe we should just recognize some connections as diversions or dead ends of this labyrinth. Particularly after battering our intellects raw during decades against some problems, without any success. One instance: the path of allusions from Dorcas (as Sev’s grandma connection of Casdoe (little Sev’s mother in the mountains), to Casdroe of the Seventeen Stones (Agilus as Septentrion), to the Seventeen Megatherians. That whole Casdroe/Little Sev part of the text seems to lead nowhere to me. Whenever I rearead I find myself jumping through this chain of allusions, always with 0 succes xD. To sum up: this passage makes me think that maybe we are reading this Book wrong. That we are reading it as a puzzle, when we should be reading it as a labyrinth. 2 I think the vision of time in tBotNS is exactly the one we see here. Time is a tapestry, each decision a branching, diverging, but sometimes also converging, leading different paths to the same scenario. With retrocausality opening new branches thus avoiding paradoxes.