Thu, January 31, 2008
La biblioteca total—3:31 PM
I'm reading this absolutely mind-bending and delightful collection of short writings by Jorge Luis Borges. For its sheer ability to have me laughing with glee on one page and contemplating the vast processes of the cosmos on the next, it rivals Bill Bryson's dazzling A Short History of Nearly Everything. It's slow, challenging reading at times, but so far it's been entirely worth it.
In one piece, "The Total Library," Borges considers the possibility of an infinite library, generated in much the same way as the texts those infinite monkeys create with their infinite typewriters. "Everything would be in its blind volumes," he writes.
Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus's Egyptians, the exact number of times the waters of the Ganges have reflected the light of a falcon, [...] the Gnostic preachings of Balisades, the song the sirens sang, the accurate catalog of the library, the proof that the catalog is fallacious.
And that's the paradox: you would know, with an infinite combination of letters and words in infinite volumes, that all the intelligence of the universe (known, unknown, or yet to come) would be there. But you would also know, as an artifact of its creation, that plenty of near-knowledge would be there. ("It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times," e.g.) You would never know if the part you were reading was the untapped secret to the meaning of life, or just gibberish that came real close.
The only way to tease apart the fact from the quasi-fact would be to figure out the reality for yourself and then compare it to a given passage from the Total Library. Which, if you think about it, is basically what scientists do.
In closing, Borges refers to the concept as that of a "vast, contradictory library, whose vertical deserts of books run the incessant risk of metamorphosis, which affirm everything, deny everything, and confuse everything – like a raving god." Reminds me of Wikipedia.
