Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Borges, Jorge Luis - Mark Mosher (essay date 1994)

Mark Mosher (essay date 1994)

SOURCE: “Atemporal Labyrinths in Time: J. L. Borges and the New Physicists,” in Symposium, Vol. XLVIII, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 51-61.

[In the following essay, Mosher argues that Borges's formulation of the nature of time and space is the same as the one advanced in modern physics.]

Modern physics has made it plainly evident that the constituents of microphysical systems operate in a manner that contradicts the accepted patterns and relationships of space and time that originated from Newton's classical mechanics. The following familiar words from Borges's “Avatars of the Tortoise” convey this very point; it indicates the inability of the old scientific paradigm to rationalize reality as it is conceived by the new physics:

We have dreamed it [the world] strong, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and secure in time; but we have allowed tenuous, eternal interstices of injustice...

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