For Borges a labyrinth is a place, somewhere you might find yourself, which has the quality of being infinite.

It might be a house and the house might have only fourteen rooms. But if those fourteen rooms are your whole world, if when you try to leave the house you are pelted with stones and must run back inside, if you cannot read and write and can only pass the time running from one room to the next to another or back again, then you are trapped, you cannot escape, your life has become a puzzle to be solved, a prison, and your life becomes one big problem to be endlessly struggled with.

A mirror can create a labyrinth since a mirror is a device that encourages reflection. It takes a certain amount of intelligence to recognise yourself in a mirror; it takes a little more reflection to realise that the image that looks back is not quite you after all. You look back at you looking at you and so on to infinity, and each passage back and forth alters you a little; each reflection subtly changes your own perception of yourself. It’s why sometimes you might have been told “Don’t overthink it”: the wise know that the act of thinking alters the object thought about, so that if you want things to remain simple it’s sometimes better not to think at all.

But things are never really simple to begin with and I suppose it’s this fact about the world that creates philosophers, and philosophical writers like Borges, in the first place. The question is: do all the philosophical reflections and meanderings help to clear up all the confusions or merely create more of them?

(I’ve been reading “The House of Asterion” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges.)