Jorge Luis Borges was a poet and it is evident in the way he writes his short stories "Circular Ruins" and "Library of Babel". His colorful vocabulary and brilliant imagery made reading enjoyable.
In his short story, "Circular Ruins", Borges tells of a wizard who spends most of his hours asleep in an old destroyed temple so that he can dream about and eventually create a human being. He takes two years to finally complete this process; starting to form the man from his internal organs to eventually having him as an apprentice. One day, the old wizard dies by fire, but not without first realizing that he is also a dreamed up man. Borges uses dreams as a labyrinth of time, suggesting that the new dreamed up man may dream up a new human being and the cycle would be continuos.
His other story "Library of Babel", tells of the world as an infinite library with human beings living on shelves and no one completely understanding the past or being able to decipher the future. At the end of the story, the narrator suggests that the same events that took place in the past are possibly repeating themselves or are going to repeat themselves in the future, and that is order.
Borges uses time as a labyrinth by looping intricate and complex series of events that have to happen in a certain way before they can move on to the next stage of being repeated.
This is not too different form Sisyphus from Ancient Greek Mythology, whose punishment was to roll up a rock to the top of the hill, only to have it fall back down, creating an eventual loop of terror.
Jorge Luis Borges was interesting to read and "Circular Ruins" particularly appealed to me because the ending came as unexpected to me.
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