The passage below is from James E. Irby’s introduction to Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths, a collection of short stories, essays, and parables all too easy to get disturbingly lost in. He’s writing about the “creative deception” Borges uses to dissolve boundaries we take for granted, such as the distinction between literature and life:
“We are transported into a realm where fact and fiction,
the real and the unreal, the whole and the part, the highest and the lowest,
are complementary aspects of the same continuous being: a realm where ‘any man
is all men’, where ‘all men who repeat a line of Shakespeare are William
Shakespeare’. The world is a book and the book is a world, and both are
labyrinthine and enclose enigmas designed to be understood and participated in
by man. We should note that this all-compromising intellectual unity is
achieved precisely by the sharpest and most scandalous confrontation of
opposites.”
