Finding the Thread: Intentionality in a Labyrinthine World

In yesterday's post I wrote about living with intentionality — about choosing direction rather than drifting, purpose rather than habit. That idea sounds simple until you look honestly at the terrain we move through each day. The modern world is less a straight road than a maze, filled with diversions that invite wandering without arrival. Which brings us to labyrinths.

The notion of labyrinths traces back to ancient mythology, but it is found throughout history. In essence, a labyrinth is a maze, a puzzle, a complicated route that leads to—or conceals—something. It is not merely a physical structure but a way of thinking about movement, confusion, discovery, and arrival. 

Many writers have made reference to labyrinths in their work, drawn to the image as both symbol and architecture. Jorge Luis Borges was famously fascinated by the idea of labyrinths, which appear repeatedly in his short stories—not always as stone corridors, but as libraries, mirrors, texts, and even time itself. In Borges, the labyrinth is often infinite, or at least suggestive of infinity, a place where the seeker risks never finding the center.

Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose was inspired in part by this fascination. The monastery library at the heart of the novel is a literal labyrinth, but it also functions as an intellectual one: a maze of forbidden knowledge, misdirection, and interpretive traps. What is hidden there is not only a book, but power—and the consequences of seeking it.

From ancient and medieval times to the present, labyrinths have held their appeal, both as real structures to be built and as ideas to be contemplated. The mind itself is often described as a labyrinth, with winding passages, dead ends, and unexpected openings. In literature, numerous characters—from Don Quixote onward—become lost in the labyrinthine worlds of their imaginations, unable to distinguish between what is real and what is desired, what is noble and what is absurd.

 

One of André Gide’s most fascinatng works is his story Theseus, about the Athenian hero who navigates the labyrinth in Crete to slay the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, aided by Ariadne’s thread. Gide’s retelling is elegant and unsettling, less about heroism than about memory, responsibility, and the ambiguity of triumph. It is an entertaining read, with unexpected twists, and it comes with my highest recommendation.

 

My first encounter with the Internet was somewhat akin to the notion of a labyrinth. If one considers each web page a room, from which one must exit to enter another room, it is easy to imagine the World Wide Web as a vast labyrinthine universe. One can wander endlessly, doubling back, following promising passages that lead nowhere, stumbling upon hidden chambers one never intended to find. Time evaporates. Direction becomes optional.
 

It was based on this concept that I created a small labyrinth when I first started building my personal website thirteen years ago. Navigation was not meant to be purely efficient. I wanted visitors to explore, to get slightly lost, to discover things indirectly rather than be delivered straight to a conclusion.

 

And if the Internet is a labyrinth, then where is the Minotaur?

 

Perhaps that question matters more than the answer. In the ancient myth, the Minotaur was the danger at the center, the thing that justified fear and demanded courage—though surprisingly contrary in Gide’s retelling. But modern labyrinths rarely announce their monsters so clearly. Sometimes the threat is distraction rather than death, confusion rather than violence, absorption rather than confrontation. Sometimes the Minotaur is not something we slay, but something that quietly consumes our attention while we wander.

 

And perhaps, like Theseus, what we need most is not a map, but a thread—some principle, intention, or memory that allows us to venture inward without losing our way back out.

In a world designed to keep us wandering, remembering to carry a thread may be the most intentional act of all. Without one, as King Lear warns, “That way madness lies.”

Related
Unraveling the Labyrinth: Literary Connections from Theseus to Borges

Jorge Luis Borges: An Introduction

Throwback Thursday: Thoreau's Journal

“A perfectly healthy sentence is extremely rare.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

I don't mind repeating the statement, "If a man is worth knowing at all he is worth knowing well." And one of the best ways to know people well is through their letters (Van Gogh) and journals, especially when they have been dead for some time. In fact, journals are possibly the most intimate way to know a person, because when you meet "in person" you seldom get to the deep things in one encounter. If at a party, art opening, a lecture or passing on the street you only exchange niceties, and perhaps encounter the spirit of the person. Even then it is the spirit of the person for only that moment in time.

A journal gives you years of intimate insights as you follow the flow of a person's thoughts as it weaves its way around circumstances, experiences, the most nebulous and the most mundane fragments of a life.

It's been my pleasure to read a number of writers' journals over the years. Thomas Mann and Andre Gide were both Nobel prize winning authors and one can glean much, much, much from a writer's journals and notebooks. If you're serious about a writing career I would recommend Gide's especially. All four volumes.

I myself have endless journal entries with which I stained dozens of notebooks over a period of thirty years. Unlike Gide, or Mann, or in this case Thoreau, the "good stuff" would probably amount to a very thin book in contrast with the volume recently edited and assembled by by Damion Searls. And Searls' version of Thoreau's Journal, while a hefty volume itself, is but one tenth of the original 7,000 pages of material.

To a journal writer like myself, this is quite an output, considering that his journal work lasted only 24 years. Then again, he didn't punch a time clock from eight to five like most of us.

Thoreau's life and world were not like ours. There was no Internet. And though the industrial age was flexing its muscles he stepped back from there, retreating to space where he could become acquainted with, even intimate with the natural world. But he was not a monastic. At Emerson's house in 1857 he met John Brown, who led the raid on Harper's Ferry, one of the powder keg events preceding the Civil War. This fateful meeting caused Thoreau to take up the abolitionist banner. And though Walden is his most well-known book, his book on civil disobedience and the obligation to follow one's conscience was probably his most influential.

As nearly all journal writers do from time to time, Thoreau made entries on the process of journal writing. “We should not endeavor coolly to analyze our thoughts, but, keeping the pen even and parallel with the current, make an accurate transcript of them. Impulse is, after all, the best linguist, and for his logic, if not conformable to Aristotle, it cannot fail to be most convincing.”

I've often considered journal writing a place to hone the skill of capturing nebulous and ethereal ideas and transforming them into concrete words. Or like a man with a butterfly net whose specialty is ultimately pinning these beautiful "finds" in boxes so others can appreciate them.

This excerpt from an Amazon.com reviewer of the book explains how this particular volume was assembled. "The primary objective was to have it read as a representative version of the full journal rather than as a collection of excerpts. The editor therefore tried to balance material among the seasons and months, including keeping one of each month relatively unabridged. Another goal was to make it readable, so there is very little in the way of notes. Entries were chosen by personal preference, not historical importance. As you read, the date appears on the left page and Thoreau's age on the right so you always know where you are both in time and in his life."

Here are some of the headings for various entries:
Composition
The Loss of a Tooth
Rivers
The Dream Valley
Drifting
Aeschylus

His fragment on poetry includes this beautiful thought. “No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself.”

Here's another excerpt, which I recently shared on my Facebook page. “Men see God in the ripple but not in the miles of still water. Of all the two-thousand miles that the St. Lawrence flows – pilgrims go only to Niagara.”

What's impressive, and surprising even, is how good the writing is. Like other writers, he used his journal to polish his craft. He appreciated the value of a good sentence, and the two million words he penned were selected, chosen, not simply thrown down to fill space in a notebook.

You can read what others have to say about this book at Amazon.com or go for the overview of his life at Wikipedia. Either way you'll be rewarded. Or you can download it to your Kindle or Nook and take it with you on your next trip.

As you embrace the day, take time to stop and smell the roses.

THIS BLOG POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN JANUARY 2012

Three Quotes from Three Favorite Writers

There are some truths we can't get away from. The more we run from them, the more we run into them.

Quotes from my Notes

"I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as "the masses." Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time." ~ Jorge Luis Borges

"A man's life is his image. At the hour of death we shall be reflected in the past and, leaning over the mirror of our acts, our souls will recognize what we are. Our whole life is spent sketching an ineradicable portrait of ourselves. The terrible thing is that we don't know this; we do not think of beautifying ourselves. ...We flatter ourselves, but later our terrible portrait will not flatter us. We recount our lives and lie to ourselves, but our life will not lie; it will recount our soul, which will stand before God in its usual posture." ~ Andre Gide, Journals, Jan 3, 1892

"It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn't the test of a man have been carried out in fewer years?" ~ Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter