I’ve been rereading Labyrinths and remembering what it felt like to encounter Borges for the first time. There’s a particular kind of vertigo his stories induce—the sense that the ground you’re standing on might be made of words all the way down.

“The Library of Babel” is the obvious example: a universe that is a library, infinite and hexagonal, containing every possible book. Most of them are gibberish. But somewhere in there is a book that explains everything, and another book that refutes it, and another that explains the refutation.

What makes it work

Other writers have played with infinity, but Borges makes you feel it. His prose is so precise and matter-of-fact that the impossible starts to seem reasonable. He describes paradoxes with the calm detachment of a librarian cataloging books.

“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.”

That parenthetical—“which others call the Library”—is doing so much work. It implies a perspective outside the story, a narrator who knows things we don’t.

The recursive quality

Stories that contain other stories that contain other stories. Maps that contain the territory. Books that describe themselves. Borges is obsessed with these recursive structures, and reading him, you start seeing them everywhere.

Maybe that’s the real effect of great fiction: it gives you new patterns to perceive the world through.