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The Book That Is the Labyrinth That Is God

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On Spinoza, Borges, and the infinite substance of all possible things Perhaps the mistake began when we imagined that the labyrinth was something through which we traveled, that there was an entrance somewhere and an exit somewhere else, that we had been placed inside a structure whose purpose was to confuse us or to test our intelligence or perhaps to punish us for some offense we had committed before we were born, and that if we were sufficiently patient, sufficiently clever, if we could remember the turns we had taken and the corridors we had abandoned, we might eventually arrive at the center where some secret had been hidden for us, or at the outer wall where the world would begin again, but this was already a misunderstanding, because there was no outer wall, and the center, if such a thing existed, was everywhere, and the corridors were not passages through space but the very substance of space, and our movements did not carry us through the labyrinth so much as they constit...
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The Christian Magician

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When I first read about Joseph Smith—about the seer stones, the buried treasures, the talisman engraved with planetary signs—I did not feel surprise. I felt recognition. A magician who sees himself as a faithful Christian. That was the phrase that trembled in my mind, like a thin wire pulled too tight. And in that trembling I saw him again: The Magician. The one that taught me when I was young, the one that I saw as a second father. I refer to him not by his given name. Not by the name that friends and enemies alike used in whispers or accusations. He will be only The Magician. Because what I am writing about is not formal biography. It is pattern. It is recurrence. It is archetype. A magician who sees himself as a faithful Christian. Others may see a contradiction. But contradiction is often the surface foam of a deeper current.   The Magician did not reject Christ. That would have been too simple. Too theatrical. He did not burn crosses or invert them or shout reb...
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