Gardens with crossed paths

"The Garden of Crossing Paths" is a science fiction novel by Borges in South America, and the protagonist is a Chinese. The author does not open a web of time in the novel, its web of threads that are close, intersecting, divided, or centuries irrelevant to each other, including all possibilities. We don't exist in most of this time: in some you exist and I don't: in others, I exist and you don't......

Borges is known as a "library writer" who spent most of his life in his study and library. The quiet, labyrinthine library is a bewildering contrast to the chaotic real world outside. And the world of books can make people imaginative, travel through time and space, and travel freely. This cannot but increase the confusion in the author's heart, giving rise to the question of "where is this body and who is this body". Modern scientific knowledge can explain many problems, but it has never been able to explain man's confusion about his own destiny and stop man's pursuit of time, space, and eternity.

In Borges's view, time is the only magician and master of the universe. Therefore, he strives to establish a cosmic schema, a labyrinth of time constructed with words and fantasy, and the novel "The Garden of Crossing Paths" is the epitome of this idea. On the surface, this is a spy novel, which tells the story of Yu Zhun, the protagonist who spies for Germany in England during World War I, and when his companion is arrested and he is hunted down, he does not hesitate to kill the sinologist Albert in order to inform his German superiors of important information. The story unfolds in the form of Yu Zhun's confession in prison after his arrest, and the postponement of a major event in the history of European warfare is a fascinating starting point. But the author's real intention is to expound his own concept of time, and the story he tells is only an illustration of his own concept of time, and he should be clear about this when reading, and appreciate the multiple meanings of "garden of intersecting paths".

Here is an excerpt from this novel, which is short but meaningful

A garden with a forked path

—To Victoria Ocampo

On page 242 of Liddell Hart's History of European Wars, it is stated that the attack of thirteen British divisions (supported by 1,400 cannons) on the Serre-Montauban line was originally scheduled for July 24, 1916, but was postponed until the morning of July 29. Captain Liddell Hart explained that the reason for the postponement was the torrential rain, which was certainly not surprising. The testimony of Dr. Yu Zhun, a former English teacher at Qingdao University, was recorded, retelled, and verified by his signature, but it provided an unexpected explanation of the incident. The first two pages of the testimony record are missing.

…… I hung up the handset. I immediately recognized the voice answering the phone in German. It was Richard Madden's voice. Madden's residence in Victor Runenberg meant that all our hard work was in vain, and our lives were coming to an end – but that was secondary, at least to me. That is, Runenberg has been arrested, or killed. Before sunset that day, I would have suffered the same fate. Madden showed no mercy. To be more precise, he had to be ruthless. As an Irishman who obeyed the orders of the British, he was suspected of being unenthusiastic and even betrayal, and now that he had the opportunity to dig up two spies of the Germanic Empire, arrest or kill them, how could he not seize this God-given opportunity and be grateful? I went upstairs into my room, locked the door ridiculously, and lay on my back on the little iron bed. Outside the window, it was still the usual rooftop and the sun obscured by clouds at six o'clock in the afternoon. This day had no premonition or omen, and it was unbelievable that it was the day of my death. Even though my father is dead, and though I spent my childhood in a symmetrical garden in Haifeng, do I have to die now? Then I thought that everything was going to happen to me sooner rather than later. How many years have been peaceful, but now something has happened; There are tens of millions of people in the sky, land and sea, and when something really happens, it's on my head...... Madden's intolerable horse triumph appeared before my eyes, dispelling my cranky thoughts. I hated and feared (I had already lied to Richard Madden and waited to be on the gallows, and it didn't matter if I admitted I was afraid), and I thought to myself that the smug Takeo who had made a mess of things must know that I had a secret. The name of the location of the British artillery corps preparing to bombard Unclair. A bird skimmed the gray sky outside the window, and I imagined it into an airplane, and then into many planes, dropping bombs on the French sky with precision, destroying the artillery team. If only I could call out the name of the place before I was hit by a bullet in my mouth, so that the Germans could hear it...... The sound of my flesh and blood is too faint. How do you get it to the ears of the head? That sick nasty man only knew that Runenberg and I were in Staffordshire, waiting for our news from our closed office in Berlin, and reading through the newspapers endlessly...... I had to run, I said loudly. I crept up needlessly, as if Madden was already spying on me. I couldn't help but check the contents of my pocket, perhaps just to prove that I couldn't do anything. What I found was what I expected. The American wall watch, the nickel watch chain, the quadrangular coin, the chain that held the key to Runenberg's house, was now useless but could constitute evidence, a notebook, a letter which I had read and decided to destroy immediately but did not, a fake passport, a coin of five shillings, two shillings and a few pennies, a red and blue pencil, a handkerchief and a revolver with a bullet. I ridiculously picked up the gun and held it in my hand to embolden myself. I vaguely thought that the sound of gunfire could travel far away. In less than ten minutes, my plan was ready. The telephone directory gave me the name of a man who was the only one who could pass on the information for me: he lived in the suburbs of Fenton, less than half an hour by train.

I'm a coward. I might as well say it now, because I have achieved a plan that no one would say is risky. I know the implementation process is scary. No, I didn't do it for Germany. I don't care about a barbaric country that has degenerated me into a spy. Moreover, I knew an Englishman – a humble man – who was no less than Goethe to me. I talked to him for less than an hour, but in the middle of that hour he was like Goethe...... I did this because I felt that the head looked down on people of my race—on the myriad of ancestors who had gathered in me. I'm going to prove to him that a yellow man can save his army. Besides, I'm going to escape from the captain's palm. He could knock on my door at any moment and call my name. I quietly dressed, said goodbye to me in the mirror, went downstairs, surveyed the quiet street, and went out. The train station is not far away, but I think it's better to take a horse-drawn carriage. The reason is to reduce the risk of being recognized; The fact is that on the deserted streets, I feel particularly conspicuous and unsafe. I remember telling the coachman to stop when he didn't reach the station. I stumbled out of the bus to the village of Ashgrove, but bought a ticket for one more stop. The train will leave at once: 8:50. I need to hurry, the next trip will be at half-past nine. There was almost no one on the platform. I looked in several carriages: several peasants, a woman in mourning, a young man who was preoccupied with reading Tasilun's Chronicle, a soldier who seemed to be happy. The train finally started. A man I knew hurried and chased him to the end of the platform, but he was a step too late. It was Captain Richard Marden. Dejected and uneasy, I ducked through the dreaded window and cowered in the corner of my seat. I went from being depressed to being self-deprecating. I thought my duel had already begun, and even though I was lucky enough to get ahead of the curve for forty minutes and dodge my opponent's attack, I won the first round. I guess this small victory presupposes complete success. I don't think the victory was small, and if it weren't for the precious preemption that the train schedule gave me, I would have been imprisoned or killed. I am not without sophistry that my cowardly success proves that I can accomplish the adventurous business. I drew from cowardice the strength that didn't abandon me at the critical moment. I expect men to succumb more and more to the worst things; It won't be long before the world is full of warriors and robbers; My advice to them is that those who do the most heinous deeds should assume that they have done it, and that they should treat the future as irreparably as if it were in the past. That's what I did, I thought of myself as if I had died, and watched the day, maybe the last day, and the night come by coldly. The train runs slowly among the (muzen) trees on both sides. Stop in a place that is so desolate as a wilderness. No one reported the station's name. Is it Ashgrove? I asked a few kids on the platform. Ashgrove, they replied. I got out of the car.

There was a light on the platform, but the children's faces were in shadow. A kid asked me, "Are you going to Dr. Stephen Albert's house?" The other child didn't wait for me to answer, and said, "His house is far from here, but if you take the road on the left, turn left at every intersection, and you won't find it." I gave them a coin (the last one on me) and descended a few stone steps down the secluded road. The road is gently downhill. It was a dirt road, lined with trees, branches meeting in the sky, and the low, round moon seemed to accompany me.

For a moment I thought that Richard Madden somehow had learned about my desperate plan. But I immediately understood that it was impossible. The child told me to keep turning left, which reminded me that this was the usual way to find the central courtyard of some labyrinth. I know something about labyrinths: I am the great-grandson of Cui Peng, the governor of Yunnan, who resigned from his high-ranking position and was bent on writing a novel with more characters than "Dream of the Red Chamber" and building a labyrinth from which no one could escape. He spent thirteen years working on these enormous tasks, but an outsider assassinated him, his novels were like a book from heaven, and his labyrinth was undiscovered. I contemplated the lost labyrinth under the trees of England: I imagined it untouched on a secret peak, buried in rice paddies or submerged under water, I imagined it to be vast, not just octagonal pavilions and winding paths, but of rivers, provinces, and kingdoms...... I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, intricate and ever-evolving labyrinths of past and future, and in a sense even other planets. I was so immersed in this illusory imagination that I forgot about my own hunt. For an indefinite period of time, I felt like I had comprehended the world in the abstract. The vague and vibrant fields, the moon, the evening hours, and the easy descent all made me feel a lot. The evening seems intimate and infinite. The road continued to descend, branching out in two branches in the blurred grass. A burst of melodious music flutters with the wind, near or far, piercing through the foliage and distance. I thought to myself that one can be the enemy of others, the enemy of others for a period, but not the enemy of a region, of fireflies, of words, of gardens, of water, and of wind. I thought so, and came to a large, rusty iron door. From the railing, you can see a forest ** and a pavilion-like building. I suddenly understood two things, the first was insignificant, the second was unbelievable; The music comes from the pavilion and is Chinese music. Because of this, I didn't listen to it and accepted it all. I don't remember if there was a bell on the door, or if I gave me a high-five. The music that was like sparks didn't stop.

However, a lantern came out of the deep house and gradually approached: a moon-white drum-shaped lantern, sometimes blocked by a tree trunk. The one carrying the lantern was a tall man. Because of the dazzling light, I couldn't see his face clearly. He opened the iron door and said to me in Chinese in a slow manner:

"It seems that Peng Xi is affectionate and doesn't let me be lonely. You probably want to visit the garden, right? "

I heard him say the name of one of our consuls, and I inexplicably continued:

"Garden?"

"A garden where the paths diverge."

My heart fluctuated, and I incomprehensibly affirmed:

"That's the garden of my great-grandfather, Trepeng."

"Your great-grandfather? Your esteemed great-grandfather? Please come in, please come in. "

The damp trail twists and turns, just like I remember from my childhood. We came to a study room with books from the East and the West. I recognized several manuscripts bound in yellow silk, which were the Yijuan of the Yongle Canon, compiled by the edict of the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty, which had never been printed. The record on the gramophone is still spinning, and there is a bronze phoenix next to it. I remember a red porcelain vase, and a blue porcelain from hundreds of years earlier, which was the work of our craftsmen imitating Persian potters......

Stephen Albert looked at me with a smile. As I said earlier, he was tall, well-defined, with gray eyes and a gray beard. He looked a little like a priest and a bit like a sailor; Later he told me that he had been a missionary in Tianjin, "before he wanted to be a sinist."

We sat down; I sat on a low couch with his back to the window and a floor-to-ceiling round table clock. I don't think Richard Madden, who was chasing me in an hour, won't get here. My irretrievable decision can wait.

"Trepen's life is truly amazing," Stephen Albert said. "He became governor of his native province, mastered astronomy, astrology, classical interpretation, chess, and was a famous poet and calligrapher: he abandoned all this to write books and build labyrinths. He abandoned his hot official status, beautiful wives and concubines, grand banquets, and even academics, and closed his house in Mingxu for less than thirteen years. After his death, the heirs found only a few disorganized manuscripts. As you may know, his family burned the manuscripts; But the executor—a Taoist priest or monk—insisted on publishing it. "

"Cui Peng's descendants," I interjected, "still blame that Taoist priest." There is no justification for publication. That book was a compilation of a bunch of contradictory drafts. I've seen it once: the protagonist dies in the third episode, and comes back to life in the fourth episode. As for Cui Peng's other work, the labyrinth ......"

"That's the labyrinth," he said, pointing to a tall lacquered cabinet.

"A labyrinth carved from ivory!" I shouted. "A miniature labyrinth ......"

"A symbolic labyrinth," he corrected me. "An invisible labyrinth of time. I, an English barbarian, had the privilege of understanding the obvious mysteries. More than 100 years later, the details are no longer available, but it is not difficult to guess what it was like. Cui Peng once said: I want to write a novel after I retire. Another time he said: I will build a labyrinth after I retreat. People think it's two things; No one thought that books and labyrinths were one thing. Mingxu Zhai is certainly built in the middle of a garden that can be said to be quite intricate; This fact is reminiscent of a real labyrinth. Cui Peng is dead; In the middle of his vast estate, no one found the labyrinth. Two situations led me to get straight to the point. One is the strange legend that Cui Peng intends to build a labyrinth of absolute boundlessness. The second is a fragment of a letter I found. "

Albert stood up. He opened the blackened golden cabinet and turned his back to me for a few seconds. He turned around with a checkered piece of tissue paper in his hand, the original red had faded to pink. Cui Peng has a good hand, and his name is well deserved. I looked eagerly, but not quite understandingly, at the words of one of my ancestors, in small letters: I have bequeathed the garden of the diverging path to some posterity (not all of it). I silently returned the piece of paper to Albert. He went on to say:

"Before I found this letter, I asked myself under what circumstances a book could become infinite. I think there's only one case, and that's the cycle goes on and on. The last page of the book must be the same as the first page, so that it can continue endlessly. I am also reminded of the night in the middle of the One Thousand and One Nights, when Queen Shan Ruzod (due to the mysterious negligence of the scribes) began to tell the story of the One Thousand and One Nights word for word, and this time it is possible to return to the night she told it, and thus become endless. I think of oral literature, dictated from father to son, passed down from generation to generation, with each new storyteller adding new chapters or reverently revising the chapters of their ancestors. I pondered these assumptions; But Zhang Hui, who contradicts Cui Peng, can't match the number. While I was perplexed, Oxford sent me the manuscript you had seen. Naturally, I noticed this statement: I leave the garden where the path diverges for some posterity (not all of it). It dawned on me almost instantly; The garden where the paths diverge is the jumble of the novel; The phrase "some hereafter" (but not all hereafter) reveals to me the bifurcation of time rather than space. I went through that work again and confirmed this theory. In all fictional novels, whenever a person is faced with several different choices, one is always chosen to the exclusion of the other; In Cui Peng's intricate novel, the protagonist chooses all possibilities. As a result, there have been many different generations and many different times, which have been derived endlessly, and the branches and leaves have been draped. This is where the contradictions of the novel begin. For example, Fang Jun has a secret; A stranger came to the door; Fang Jun was determined to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible endings: Fang Jun may kill the uninvited guest, he may be killed, both of them may be safe and sound, or they may both die, and so on. In Cui Peng's work, there are various endings; Each ending is the starting point for others. Sometimes, the paths of the labyrinth converge: for example, you came here, but in one possible past, you were my enemy, and in another past you were my friend. If you can put up with my terrible pronunciation, let's read a few pages. "

In the bright light, his face was undoubtedly that of an old man, but with a certain unwavering, even immortal look. He reads two ways of writing the same chapter slowly and precisely. First, an army crossed the barren mountains and went into battle; The arduous march on the mountains made them win the battle with ease, at the cost of their lives; Second, the same army passed through a palace where the feast was being held, and the jubilant battle seemed to continue the feast, and they were victorious. I listened to these ancient tales with reverence, and to my amazement was that the people who came up with the stories were my ancestors, and it was a man from a distant empire who restored the stories to me, and time was in the midst of a desperate adventure in a western island country. I still remember the last sentence, repeated in each of these writings like a mystical commandment: Heroes fought like this, fearless in their respectable hearts, with their swords so fierce that they sought to kill their opponents or die in battle.

From that moment on, I felt an invisible, untouchable restlessness around me and deep within my body. Not the restlessness of the armies that have diverged, that have gone hand in hand, that have converged eventually, but a more difficult to grasp, more secretive agitation that has been foreseen by those armies. Stephen Albert went on to say:

"I don't believe that your illustrious ancestors would play with different ways of writing in vain. I don't think he could have spent thirteen years in endless rhetorical experiments. In your country, fiction is a secondary literary genre; At that time, it was considered undecent. Peng Yan is a genius novelist, but he is also a literary scholar, and he would never think of himself as just a novelist. His contemporaries recognized his preference for metaphysics and mysticism, and his life fully confirmed this. Philosophical discussions occupy much of his novels. I know that the unfathomable issue of time is the one he cares about and focuses on the most. However, this problem is not present in the manuscript of The Garden. Not even the word 'time' is used. How do you explain this deliberate avoidance? "

I make a few observations; None of them are enough to answer. We argue endlessly; Stephen Albert concludes:

"When you set up a riddle with the answer to the riddle is 'chess', what is the only word that is not allowed to be used in the riddle?" I thought for a moment later and said:

"The word 'chess'."

"Not bad," Albert said. "The garden where the path diverges is a vast riddle, or a fable, and the riddle is time; This secret reason does not allow the word 'time' to appear in the manuscript. Cutting out a word throughout, using clumsy metaphors and obvious detours is perhaps the best way to pick out the riddle. In his tireless novels, Cui Peng uses a roundabout approach at every turn. I checked hundreds of pages of manuscripts, corrected the scribe's omissions, guessed the scrambled intentions, restored, or I thought restored the original order, and translated the whole work; But I never found any place where the word 'time' was used. Obviously, the garden with diverging paths is an incomplete but by no means false image of the universe in Cui Peng's mind. Your ancestor differs from Newton and Schopenhauer in that he believed that time has no identity and absoluteness. He believes that time has an infinite number of series, diverging, converging and parallel times woven into an ever-growing and intricate web. A web of times that are close to each other, divergent, intertwined, or never interfere with each other contains all possibilities. Most of the time, we don't exist; At some point, there is you and not me; At other times, there is me and not you; For a little longer, you and I exist. At this moment, chance makes you come to the house; In another moment, you walk through the garden and find that I am dead; In another moment, I said what I had said so far, but I was a mistake, a ghost. "

"At all times," I said with a slight shock, "I always thank and admire you for recreating Trevpen's garden. "

"It can't be at all times," he laughs. "Because time is forever bifurcated, leading to countless futures. At some point in the future, I can be your enemy. "

I felt the restlessness I had just mentioned. I felt that the damp garden around the house was filled with countless people who could not be seen. Those people were Albert and me, hidden in other dimensions of time, busy and shapely. When I raised my eyes again, the nightmarish mist dissipated. There was only one man in the yellow and black garden, but that man was as powerful as a statue, and he was Captain Richard Marden walking up the path.

"The future is already a fact in front of me," I said. "But I'm your friend. Can I take another look at that letter? "

Albert stood up. He was tall and opened the drawer of the tall cabinet; For a few seconds, he turned his back to me. I've got my pistol in hand. I pulled the trigger with great care: Albert immediately fell to the ground, without a snort. I'm sure he died instantly, suddenly.

The rest of the things are insignificant, like a dream. Madden barged in and arrested me. I was sentenced to be hanged. I was badly victorious: I informed Berlin of the secret name of the city that was supposed to be attacked. Yesterday they carried out bombing; I saw it in the newspapers. There was also a piece of news in the newspaper that the famous sinologist Stephen Albert was assassinated by a stranger named Yu Zhun and the motive of the assassination was unknown, which created a mystery for the British. The head of Berlin solved the mystery. He knew that in the midst of the war I would not be able to tell the name of the city called Albert, and that there was no other way to do it than to kill a man with that name. He doesn't know (and no one can know) my infinite remorse and weariness.