The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui Pên conceived it.
In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time.
He believed in an infinite series of times, in
a growing,
dizzying net of
divergent,
convergent
and parallel times.
This network of times which
approached one another,
forked,
broke off,
or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.
We do not exist in the majority of these times;
in some you exist, and not I;
in others I, and not you;
in others, both of us.
Jorge Luis Borges
The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.
That means nothing.
People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between
past,
present,
and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion
Albert Einstein
from QuoteDB