I am not sure what “The Garden of Forking Paths” is trying to accomplish, but I am interested in the contrasting views it seems to provide on our future and past. The narrator offers this advice to “soldiers and bandits,” “Whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as his past” (Borges, 3). Later, when he is presented with the idea of “The garden of forking paths,” something “stirred in his (my) memory” (Borges, 4). These feel like two separate ideas, one that uses one’s past to mean a state of being that cannot be altered or moved, and one that acknowledges that our past is in our memory and mind, and therefore can be hidden from us. This piece seems to be in part about knowledge and how we come to have it, and this is an example of how one’s ancestors or ancestry can be “hidden” or exist within us in a different way.
