The first maze was the human body. To primitive man, a victim's convoluted intestines were proof that the labyrinth form contained life. Through history, the maze evolved into a means of fortification, an obstacle course designed to protect the castle within by trapping enemies seeking entrance. Modern man reduced the notion to a geometric style of gardening, an intricate network of hedged alleys that can lead a visitor to an open space in the middle—if he makes all the correct turns. Still, mythology lent the maze heroic proportions: it took a Theseus to tackle the labyrinth at Knossos, kill the Minotaur within and return from the depths.
In many ways, Armand G. Erpf is a contemporary man of myth and a contemporary hero. An investment banker (he is a senior partner in Loeb, Rhoades & Co.) and a multimillionaire at 71, Erpf is regarded as one of Wall Street's most secretive and successful adventurers, risking hundreds of thousands of dollars in quixotic, unpredictable enterprises, among them New York magazine. There is a $500,000 chair endowed in his honor at Columbia University, and another—of the wooden, folding variety—bearing his name at New York's Theater for Ideas, an intellectual audience-participation forum, of which he was a founding member. Four years ago, he married a woman less than half his age; he is now the enthusiastic father of a three-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son.
About the same time he married, Erpf decided that he had to have a maze on his 500-acre property in the Catskills. And not just a collection of decorative hedging either. He called Michael Ayrton, a maze-mad English sculptor, architect and author of The Maze Maker, a fictional autobiography of Daedalus. "I just read your book," said Erpf. "I want one of those." Today, thanks to Ayrton, Armand Erpf has "one of those."
It is the largest maze in the world and, according to Ayrton, "the only one of stone since the 4th or 5th century B.C." The Erpf maze contains 1,680 feet of passageway, with brick walls running from six to eight feet in height. Ayrton considers the work "environmental sculpture." Erpf considers it "an esthetic experience, a symbol in a world so caught up with scientific rationalism it doesn't know where it's going. You can't get to the center of a maze by going straight for it. You have to be indirect. The way to attain something is to go away from it. The maze is a spiritual truth."
Except for landscaping (Erpf envisions a backdrop of "melancholy trees"), the structure is now virtually complete. Erpf's three-year-old daughter, Cornelia, wanders about the maze and Erpf has made it to the center in five minutes. For the uninitiate, mastering the maze can take half an hour of trial and error. Ayrton has provided no printed explanation or map to the solution. "If a person could walk in and figure it out," he explains, "I would feel I had failed."