A biblioteca de babel site

Like all the men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs. Now that my eyes can hardly make out what I myself have written, I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born. When I am dead, compassionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite.

Well, our own world isn't quite as bad - but it's still harder than it should be to locate the books you really want to read, when they're mixed up with the ones you just think you might want to read. I am often appalled at the amount of time I waste on this site, but comfort myself with the thought that it has helped me find some amazing books I normally wouldn't even have considered.

But exactly how helpful has it been? The other day, it occurred to me to try and answer this question quantitatively. I calculate that, since I started hanging out here in late 2008, I have read 42 books just because someone here has recommended them. (I didn't count books recommended by people on Goodreads whom I also know in real life, otherwise the figure would be considerably higher). After some more thought, I've picked out a Top Ten, which I present here for your amusement:

10. I've never seen anyone outside Goodreads mention Everything Explained Through Flowcharts, recommended to me by David G, but it's the funniest thing I've seen in ages. I challenge you to read it without giggling helplessly at least a couple of times. Why it isn't more famous is more than I understand.

9. À rebours, a weird 19th century French novel recommended to me by Sabrina, is another book that deserves to be better known. Nothing happens, but it's somehow utterly compelling. I think it's also been very influential.

8. I love books written under strong formalist constraints, but I'd never heard of Eunoia, recommended by Gary. Five chapters, each using only one vowel, and, even though it sounds impossible, it works remarkably well as poetry. Really!

7. Eric W recommended The Terrible Hours: The Greatest Submarine Rescue in History. If you're after inspiration and good old-fashioned heroism, look no further.

6. Choupette was so indignant about Plateforme that I had to check it out for myself. I liked it enough that I also read Les particules élémentaires. I won't promise that you'll enjoy them, but they're certainly going to make you think.

5. Everyone recommended The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Alas, all too true. The mere fact that I'm sitting here writing this proves his point.

4. Would you believe it, I hadn't even heard of Infinite Jest before I joined GR. Within a couple of months, I'd given in and bought a copy. Admittedly, I also bought a copy of Twilight at the same time...

3. Pavel told me I had to read Voices from Chernobyl, and he was right. Whatever your opinions on nuclear power, it's irresponsible not to. You can't take more than a chapter or so at a time; after that, you just sit there stunned, doing your best not to cry. Another book that people have unaccountably overlooked.

2. Was I really going to read a thousand page physics text full of scary math? I did a math degree in the late 70s, but this looked way over my level. However, Nick called me chicken enough times that I decided to tackle The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. I've finally got to the end, and wow, was it a fascinating read! If you like math and physics, take Nick's advice: forget the pop science books and go for the big one. It's worth the effort.

1. I don't really know Norwegian, and how likely was it that I'd buy a three volume magical-realist Norwegian novel by an author I'd never heard of? But, moved by Oriana's glowing review, I started thinking that I speak Swedish, Norwegian isn't that different (it's a kind of Spanish/Portuguese deal), so why not give it a shot? By the time I was 20 pages into Forføreren, I was hooked, and then I immediately continued with Erobreren and Oppdageren. The trilogy is the most brilliant thing I have read this century, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Thank you Oriana!

So, there you are, and I hope I've made at least one sale :) In the interests of completeness, here's the rest of the list, in alphabetical order:

99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style

The Authoritarians

The Bent Sword

Breaking Dawn

Crowds and Power

The Dreamfighter: And Other Creation Tales

Eclipse

L'élégance du hérisson

Exercices de Style

Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will

Go the Fuck to Sleep

Galatea 2.2

Gray Matters

Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!

The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

How To Learn Any Language: Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and on Your Own

Musical Chairs

Mysterier

New Moon

No Hope for Gomez!

Not a Chance: Fictions

The Riddler's Gift (Lifesong, #1)

The Sparrow

Sult

The Triple A's Check It Out

Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

Whom God Would Destroy

Zazie dans le métro

Happy Goodreading!

Why read fiction? One answer I return to again and again: to fire the imagination.

You might be stumped coming up with a short story that has fired the imagination in more ways for more readers than The Library of Babel by the great Jorge Luis Borges.

"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below-one after another, endless."

So reads the opening lines of this seven-pager. That's right, seven pages containing fifteen paragraphs, but one has the feeling all the many bits of detail within any of those paragraphs could gyrate outward to generate infinite possibilities. Sidebar: Take a moment to scan the multitude of artist's renderings of the library via a simple Google search.

For any lover of books across the globe, this Borges tale is a MUST READ (Link below). I'll contain my excitement by confining my observations to the following quartet:

ONE BOOK BECOMES BILLIONS OF BOOKS
Let's take a simple example: 500 of my reviews are collected into one thick volume. By a simple rearrangement of individual reviews, we come up with billions of books. How many exactly? Is there a mathematician in the house?

Anyway, you get the idea. Take a book you yourself might write - collection of reviews, essays, stories, poems, whatever. Now imagine how that one book could translate into an entire library of Babel. Easy as pie or perhaps I should say pi-squared.

INTERNET LIBRARY
Jonathan Basile created an internet version of the Babylon library. How many books are included? Jonathan notes if a user clicked through the books at a rate of one per second, it would take about 10 to the power of 4668 years to go through the library. Unfortunately, he continues, the earth will be consumed by the sun in less than 10 to the power of 10 years.

PHILOSOPHER CHIMES IN
In his analysis of the library in Borges' tale, W. V. O Quine wrote: "The ultimate absurdity is now staring us in the face: a universal library of two volumes, one containing a single dot and the other a dash. Persistent repetition and alternation of the two are sufficient, we well know, for spelling out any and every truth. The miracle of the finite but universal library is a mere inflation of the miracle of binary notation: everything worth saying, and everything else as well, can be said with two characters."

Is this overstatement by an analytic philosopher? To take one example: How about Concrete Poetry or a novel like John the Posthumous by Jason Schwartz where a critical part of the work is the exact placement of words on a page?

THE DECISIVE DIVIDING LINE
Eduardo Galeano bemoaned the fact a huge number of his potential readers are cut off from reading his books since they never had the opportunity to learn how to read. This counts as a tragedy in our modern world - large chunks of the world's population remain illiterate.

Link to The Library of Babel: https://sites.evergreen.edu/political...

In this short story, Author Jorge Luis Borges envisions a universe in the form of a vast library, a library of meticulous pattern and structure. In this library, you can find an incomprehensible number of hexagonal rooms with a specific number of books: Books that contain all knowledge of the universe. But here is the catch: All this knowledge is mixed with utter gibberish.

The author, Mr. Borges, was a librarian himself and it is safe to assume that the inspiration of his unique universe came from his surroundings, and it is quite brilliant. He reflects the flaws of human kind subtly here in form of rogue librarians, mystical legends, and slow madness.

Nevertheless, the short story itself is filled with bits of Babel as it's more of a detailed description of an alternative universe and not a story. I was going to give a three stars rating and move on with my life.

But then I found a Website.

I think I am late to the party, but two years before, a man named Jonathan Basile created the library of Babel online using an algorithm. Any English sentence/paragraph of length 3200 characters can be found this library mixed with Babel. There are about 10^5000 books in this library (Age of Earth is 10^17 seconds). To understand What's actually happening, you might need to watch a Youtube video. But let me tell you something, the library contains every sentence you have ever said or will say in future, It contains every book ever written or will be written, It contains the first words you ever said and last words you will say, it contains secrets to the universe and unfortunately or fortunately, it contains a lot of gibberish.

And before even I wrote this review, these sentences were there in Library of Babel.

It's no trick, it's just about exhausting every possible combination the 26 letters of the alphabet can create!

Paradoxes abound in this allegory that has aspects of The Blind Watchmaker, especially DNA, and also the Infinite Monkey Theorem.

I have the Collected Fictions (with copious translator's notes), but am splitting my review of that into its components, in publication order: Collected Fictions - all reviews. This is one of the the longer stories in The Garden of Forking Paths, published in 1941.

The universe is an infinite Library. Maybe the universe is the internet? But Borges’ library is more beautiful: an endless series of connecting, identical, hexagons, and it has - and will - exist for eternity.

Each vestibule has “a mirror which faithfully duplicates appearances”, leading men to infer that the Library is not infinite, otherwise “what need would there be for that illusory replication?”

But it is infinite: the books contain “all that is able to be expressed, in every language”, composed of the same alphabetic elements, and each is unique. But are uniqueness and infinity contradictory?

Most of the books are indecipherable, and “trying to find sense in books” is “a vain and superstitious habit”, likened to palmistry and numerology. Surely that doesn’t apply to this, or does it? (Recursion, again.)

“You who read me – are you certain you understand my language?”

“Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the work of chance or malevolent demiurges; the universe… can only be the work of a god.” That’s “a god”, not “God”.

Who or what made me? Am I real, or just making marks on one of an infinite number of pages that may never be read?

These ideas of infinity are explored and elaborated on in “Undr” and The Mirror and the Mask, which throw minimalism into the mix. More specifically, the story of The Book of Sand is like the Library of Babel in miniature: a single, infinite book. They are all in The Book of Sand.

His best-known books, Ficciones and El Aleph, published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, philosophers, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, and mythology.

His work has been recommended to me numerous times but I was quite intimated and didn't know where to start. Therefore, I opted for reading just a single short story from Ficciones first. (Most of them can be found online actually.^^)

The Library of Babel seemed most interesting to me, mainly due to its intriguing title. Most of ya'll are probably familiar with the origin myth of the Tower of Babel meant to explain why the world's peoples speak different languages. I was curious to see how language and maybe even a competition between God and humans would come to play in this story.

In The Library of Babel, Borges speculates about a possible world which basically is a library that is preexistent and houses an infinite amount of books. The narrator explains that he therefore believes that the library contains all possible combinations of the alphabet, which means that any book that has ever been written, will be written and will never be written are already in the library.

Technically, the library should be a hoard of knowledge. Somewhere in it, the cure for cancer has already been written down. Somewhere in it, the events of your death will be narrated. The crux lies in the fact that one will never find the passages, because in order to find them, one must already know exactly what one is looking for. For example, there are an infinite amount of sentences starting with the words "the cure for cancer is ...", if one wants to find the right one, one must already what the right cure is. Therefore, it's paradox. The library houses an infinite amount of valuable knowledge, as well as an infinite amount of nonsense. Which renders the whole library nonsensical and useful in and out of itself.

Therefore, due to its infinite vastness, the library isn't accessible to the librarians who live in it. Instead, they stumble from one nonsensical book to the other. But since, as the narrator rightly notes, the library also must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages, it isn't surprising that most people in Borges' world are obsessed with finding useful knowledge in this library. They see it as their mission. It is a chilling vision of a dystopian future.

The library is composed of an infinite array of hexagonal galleries containing an indefinite number of books. The books in the library are of bounded length, "each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters".

Through reading this story, it was incredibly hard for me to envision how this library would work, but there is this amazing website (libraryofbabel.info) which is basically a simulation of how Borges' library would work. It's crazy. It is nearly impossible to find a sentence (in a English that is comprehensible to you) by simply browsing a couple of these shelves and yet, somewhere in this infinity, you could even find your own name and those of your friends and family. It's such a mindfuck and I love it!

The story is a great exploration of how something meaningful becomes nonsensical in infinity. I mean, if one wanted to estimate the size of the library, one would come to the following result: With a round library the diameter would amount to approximately 10^600,000 metres. In contrast, the universe visible for us is relatively small with a diameter of only 8,8 · 10^26 metres. How crazy is that? We, as human beings, cannot even imagine or fathom this sense of infinity.

W. V. O. Quine noted that we will theoretically come to a point in history where everything has been written and that any text that doesn't fit in a single book can be reconstructed by finding a second book (which is guaranteed to exist) with the continuation, therefore the library must be finite. The size of the alphabet can be reduced by using, say, Morse code, even though it makes the books more verbose; the size of the books can also be reduced by splitting each into multiple volumes and discarding the duplicates.

“The ultimate absurdity is now staring us in the face: a universal library of two volumes, one containing a single dot and the other a dash. Persistent repetition and alternation of the two are sufficient, we well know, for spelling out any and every truth. The miracle of the finite but universal library is a mere inflation of the miracle of binary notation: everything worth saying, and everything else as well, can be said with two characters.” — W. V. O. Quinte

While interesting to contemplate, this isn't my cup of tea.

Understanding? Certain? Wouldn't even pretend. A Kaleidoscope of earlier ideas like Borel's dactylographic monkey theorem, Pascal's metaphor and Robert Burton's variations, a mathematical thought experiment with infinities and labyrinths that employs cabalistic reasoning which blurs the infinite and the finite with philosophical implications that puts the Gita in mind, a melting pot of motifs that would influence Eco's influential masterpiece - the name of the rose, and a strange allegory that had me reading all over the internet and pondering for hours I know not how many. And all these in a short-story. Moving his bigger works to top-priority.

The eight pieces of this book do not require extraneous elucidation.

That might be best.

I have been trying to work out how to communicate idea Borges seems to be trying to communicate. If Borges can't explain it, I surely can't.

I believe that many academicians, librarians, archivists, orators, and text/code geeks understand the spiritual imagery of place.of information processing and communication. I have had dreams of showing up to a writing class where no one can write, showing up to a committee meeting too late without my materials . It is a spiritual nightmare set in a communications venue. First come the words before the actions. To say that The Divine moves in the world because we are The Hands is to forget that wprds, thoughts, words went first.

The Library of Babel struck me immediately as being a bad dream. The motif of the library is a common element in science, yes--maybe a more significantly common dream element to a librarian.

It has been a long while since I have been in an academic library, yet I do remember that along the time of mid-20th century was the time that the Library of Congress divided a century. Books were physically multiply. Books with sturdy backs and heavy weight page leaves. Books that require certain conditions. Books that. . . . ad infinitum.

For someone like Borges was a constant reader, this increase in books was a special level of hell, one so special that it had no levels. But there were levels that while not round were less box-like.

I can see how this dream that Borges describes in The Library of Babel was a nightmate, a horror, for him.

I am listing this book among my 10 horror selections of 2021.

Re-read this week and still, what a beautiful exercise in manifestation of thought and expression.

"If honour and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let your enormous Library be justified. "

Curiosity took the better of me and I admittedly read it in English, Spanish, German, and Italian for comparison.

"Para percibir la distancia que hay entre lo divino y lo humano, basta comparar estos rudos símbolos trémulos que mi falible mano garabatea en la tapa de un libro, con las letras orgánicas del interior: puntuales, delicadas, negrísimas, inimitablemente simétricas."

"Anche si spero, a quel tempo, nella spiegazione dei misteri fondamentali dell'umanita: l'origine della Biblioteca e del tempo."

"Oh Zeit, deine Pyramiden."

The modulation of language is intoxicating.

***

20th October 2019:

“I cannot combine some characters

dhcmrlchtdj

which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology.”

We read all these wonderful books and refer to critics and theorists to try to unlock the core of the stories...
The recognition of the complexity of the world and the excitement of simply finding a heap of truth... that's what literature is about.

Thank you for reminding me of how mysterious and vaste the world is, Borges.

MUST READ AGAIN. AND AGAIN.

I was intrigued from the moment I started reading and that was the first line that really drew me in. Why was he born in the library? Is this where we all live?

For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency.

This line felt especially poignant, considering what’s happening in the world.

There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist-somewhere in some hexagon.

Are all the solutions at our fingertips? I like to believe they are. Humans are capable of incredible things. The answer is somewhere. But, as the author continues, maybe we can lose hope in that future.

That unbridled hopefulness was succeeded, naturally enough, by a similarly disproportionate depression. The certainty that some bookshelf in some hexagon contained precious books, yet that those precious books were forever out of reach, was almost unbearable.

They would invade the hexagons, show credentials that were not always false, leaf disgustedly through a volume, and condemn entire walls of books. It is to their hygienic, ascetic rage that we lay the senseless loss of millions of volumes.

It made me think of book bannings, and people that don’t wish for more knowledge because they think it goes against their personal beliefs. Think of the uproar made within the past year about what is being taught in schools. I’ve always been of the firm belief that the light of knowledge should never be hidden under a bushel. The more we know, the more we grow as a society and as individuals.

I enjoyed reading this short story. I thought it was beautifully done and gave me a lot to think about.

Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.

Unfortunately the presentation was too dry for me. It didn't inspire me to want to think on it, especially at this time while my brain is overloaded with work. I may revisit this some time in the future because I feel like I should have loved it.

At present, the site has catalogued every possible combination of 3200 characters. You can read how its done on the site – its really incredible. You can type in any paragraph, from the opening of your own novel to the end of your favorite thriller, and find that it already exists in a specific page of a specific book on a specific shelf in the library.

Navigating the site is an eerie experience. You can look through pages upon pages of gibberish, encountering random words, mysterious strings of letters. I highly recommend you spend a little while getting acquainted with the library. Every conversation you have had or will ever have exists there.

A precise description of the manner and date of your death exists in the library.

A precise description of what your friends really think about you exists in the library.

They already exist, waiting to be uncovered, amongst unimaginable piles of gibberish and fragments.

I only wonder what Borges would've thought of it.

I know that Borges is really discussing the history, and completeness, of human knowledge but his essay, as Rowe suggests, has marked implications for those trying to create a universal library today. Such entities might include Google or Amazon, amongst others. The sheer futility of gathering every last letter of every last book that has ever existed, or that could possibly have existed, is put across quite clearly by Borges.

The resulting chaos of having to wade through mountains of garbage to find the occasional book that is readable, or desirable, seems to point directly to our modern experience with the internet. The internet is viewed as having the potential to contain "everything". Whether that is even something we should be striving for is not even open for discussion at present as the digitizers run rampant with information.

I guess I should be happy that librarians will become more, not less, necessary in the digital world in order to help confused souls navigate their way to useful information amongst the sea of dross and because they will be needed to navigate and critically analyze that dross themselves in order to create robust bibliographies for digi-patrons.

The start of my library science studies have proved a remarkable place for philosophical thinking, thankfully.