From Jorge Luis Borges's "The Immortal" (Commonplace Book)

I had made my way through a dark maze, but it was the bright City of the Immortals that terrified and repelled me. A maze is a house built purposely to confuse men; its architecture, prodigal in symmetries, is made to serve that purpose. In the palace that I imperfectly explored, the architecture had no purpose. There were corridors that led nowhere, unreachably high windows, grandly dramatic doors that opened onto monklike cells or empty shafts, incredible upside-down staircases with upside-down treads and balustrades. Other staircases, clinging airily to the side of a monumental wall, petered out after two or three landings, in the high gloom of the cupolas, arriving nowhere. I cannot say whether these are literal examples I have given; I do know that for many years they plagued my troubled dreams; I can no longer know whether any given feature is a faithful transcription of reality or one of the shapes released by my nights. This City, I thought, is so horrific that its mere existence, the mere fact of its having endured -- even in the middle of a secret desert -- pollutes the past and the future and somehow compromises the stars. So long as this City endures, no one in the world can ever be happy or courageous.