Library of Babel
The Library of Babel is a 1941 short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story brings together a number of trademark Borgesian ideas, such as the infinite, and the paradoxical nature of the world.
In this story, Borges’ narrator describes the universe as a vast and virtually infinite library, comprising a great number of hexagonal rooms, with various floating staircases and long galleries, containing a huge number of books. These books comprise every possible permutation or combination of 25 symbols: 22 letters, the comma and full stop, and the space. All the books are exactly 410 pages long, and every single one is different from all the rest.
Among all these books, somewhere, are the ‘Vindications’: books which excuse away every sin man has committed, and offer keys for his future. However, the chances of finding the relevant Vindications is said to be zero, given the magnitude of the library. So, most of the books are useless because they are incomprehensible to the librarians who study them.
To make this task easier, some librarians attempted to remove the books they perceived as useless or irrelevant. But this was futile, because there were always hundreds of thousands of near-identical copies of any one book (different from the discarded book by just one character here or there), and the library was so vast that any human attempt to cull the number would produce virtually no effect on the library’s vast size. The narrator concludes by asserting that the Library of Babel is infinite and cyclical.
‘The Library of Babel’, can be described as a story that exposes the absurd futility of humanity’s attempt to understand everything, when there is so much to comprehend – an almost infinite amount, in fact.
Adapted from interestingliterature blog
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