You know a writer's great when they have the ability to change the way you think about the world. Borges' mathematical interpretation of cosmology branches off in several directions with all the stories he writes. Some are set in the real world, but most are set in fantasy worlds, where the narrator might appear to be talking about our world at first, instead of his own.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius left me speechless. Imagine a world of immaterial things, only the thoughts and ideas of geniuses, with no actions whatsoever. It's like a representation of what the afterlife might look like on the mental plane of metaphysical philosophy.
The Circular Ruins is like the idea behind The Never Ending Story - that our creator is imagining (or dreaming) us into existence, while we in turn dream him (or others) into existence.
The Lottery of Babylon suggests that the creator of the world leaves everything up to chance; that everything that happens, even something as insignificant as a grain of sand landing on a beach, is the result of a lottery number drawn from an infinite number of others.
The Library of Babel also plays with the idea of infinite possibilities. It suggests that the narrator's universe is made up of an infinite number of rooms where books can be arranged in an infinite number of letters. I sure wouldn't want the daunting task of doing research in that library!
The idea behind The Garden of Forking Paths probably makes the most sense out of all of them. It says that time is an infinite fractal of constantly diverging paths; that everything that has happened and could possibly happen exists in our universe and ones parallel to it. This seems to predict some of the new multiverse theories in cosmological physics, though I don't think he ever studied it.
Borges was a straight up genius. Even though his stories are fast-paced, he leaves enough on the table for you to understand, though not always completely.
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