When book lovers from Harold Bloom to Michael Dirda praise a writer as highly as they do Jorge Luis Borges, I approach the author with trepidation. So it was with Labyrinths. I’m sorry I waited this long.
The stories, essays, and parables collected here deal with a few central ideas: God, shared consciousness, Xeno’s paradox, the identity of a person and his nemesis, and something I’ll helplessly describe as the idea that each single act is eternal and universal: Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it; any man is all men.
Yet Borges works out the implications of this small inventory of ideas in rich variations that seem limitless. Two recurrent images are “mirror” and “labyrinth”. These are fitting, given his underlying philosophy. They are apt metaphors for consciousness—especially the mind trying to examine itself.
I should also mention one more feature, something you don’t expect from a book on one of those intimidating “you must read this” lists: namely, how often I laughed out loud. I savored the narrative voice, the voice of a pedant, writing with ironical distance. This voice—both in its pedantry and its irony—seems apt because I felt Borges has indeed made his way through the infinite library—not the frightening library of Babel he invents, but the existing one that stands in part on my shelves as well. I recognized myself in his story, “The Theologians”: “Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety; this controversy (Aurelian’s current project) enabled him to fulfill his obligations to many books which seemed to reproach him for his neglect.”
I suspect this is one of those books I will not neglect, but reread. ( )

"You are everything, and everything is you" -The Stylistics
-also, Jorge Luis Borges

infinite recursive labyrinths and god. ( )

Borges' bite-sized fiction is perfect for short reading breaks like a ride on the train--that is, if you're ready to have your head done in on the way. ( )

Metaphysics meets fantasy in a breathtaking series of stories and essays. Challenging but rewarding. ( )