The Garden of Forking Paths
The German spy Yu Tsun is escaping from Britain because his true identity has been revealed. He arrives in a big house where he meets Stephen Albert who is studying the life's work of Ts'ui Pen, the main character's ancestor. It turns out that Yu Tsun' grand-grand father invented "the garden of the forking paths" — a book, which is also a labyrinth.
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The book contains all possible outcomes of every possible event that could ever happen. Time in this book isn't linear, because there are parallel and bifurcating timelines, all registered in the book and all happening at the same time
“He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time — the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries — embraces every possibility”
(“The Garden of Forking Paths”, p. 7).
The metaphor for time
How this metaphor helps us to understand our world
2. Freedom and free will.
Because every possible outcome has been written in the book, each person can pick any of them. It means that the future isn't predestined and built on a person's choices.
Familiar concept in a new story
Infinity
The number of possible outcomes listed in the book is infinite. Every decision, every little change creates a new possible timeline that can lead to a completely different future. This infinity concept helps us to think about time in an unusual way — as a non-linear phenomenon without a starting point and an end.
This is a real labyrinth-garden in Venice which was inspired by our story
As you can see, this is another interpretation of infinity and another great story filled with metaphors, allegories, and interpretations