labyrinths

"Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us."

"Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in "Labyrinths", p.27


"One of the schools of Tlon goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory."

Ibid, p.34


"The methodical fabrication of hronir (says the Eleventh volume) has performed prodigious services for archaeologists. It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past, which is now no less plastic and docile that the future."

Ibid, p.38

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind."

Extract from Burnt Norton by TS Eliot (part of the Four Quartets series)

See also the fascinating life and work of the somewhat eccentric John William Dunne, an aeronautical engineer by trade, and speculator on non-linear time by hobby, born in Co. Kildare in 1875.

(Image courtesy of: http://acepilots.com/airplanes/country/british/dunne-biplane/)