Borges: The Library of Babel [pdf]
sites.evergreen.edu
sites.evergreen.edu
I used to joke that I was going to introduce a phone that could remember 10M 7-digit numbers: just enter the 7-digit index of the phone number you want to recall.
Borges and Cortázar taught me anew what literature could be when I thought it was all the same. They are amazing authors and reading them is transformative.
"You were asleep. I wake you. The vast morning brings the illusion of a beginning. You had forgotten Virgil. Here are the hexameters. I bring you many things. The four Greek elements: earth, water, fire, air. The single name of a woman. The friendship of the moon. The bright colors of the atlas. Forgetting, which purifies. Memory, which chooses and rediscovers. The habits which help us to feel we are immortal. The sphere and the hands that measure elusive time. The fragrance of sandalwood. The doubts that we call, not without some vanity, metaphysics. The curve of the walking stick the hand anticipates. The taste of grapes and of honey."
"Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone."
"All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare."
"If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author."
"Jorge Luis Borges fantasizes about Shakespeare speaking to God: I who have been so many men in vain want to be one, to be myself. God answered him out of a whirlwind: I too am not I; I dreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your own work, and among the forms of my own dream are you, who like me are many, yet no one."
"You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened."
"This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries –embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and yet in others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words but am in error, a phantom Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures."
"The Visuddhimagga (Road to Purity), illustrates the same doctrine with the same figure: Strictly speaking, the duration of the life of a living being is exceedingly brief, lasting only while a thought lasts. Just as a chariot wheel in rolling rolls only at one point of the tire, and in resting rests only at one point; in exactly the same way the life of a living being lasts only for the period of one thought (Radhakrishnan: Indian Philosophy, I, 373). Other Buddhist texts say that the world annihilates itself and reappears six thousand five hundred million times a day and that all men are an illusion, vertiginously produced by a series of momentaneous and solitary men. The being of a past moment of thought — the Road to Purity tells us — has lived, but does not live nor will it live. The being of a future moment will live, but has not lived nor does it live. The being of the present moment of thought does live, but has not lived nor will it live (op. cit., I, 407), a dictum which we may compare with the following of Plutarch (De E apud Delphos, 18): The man of yesterday has died in that of today, that of today dies in that of tomorrow."
I love Borges. Part of the reason he's less well known is that his widow has kept a tight grip on his estate. Even denying his co-translator publishing rights. And Borges used to give him 50pc of the sales!
https://www.google.com/doodles/112th-birthday-of-jorge-luis-...
In my academic circles he was a demigod, alongside other giants of South American and SA diaspora literature like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Isabella Allende, and was considered more or less on par with Franz Kafka in terms of significance. Familiarity with all his major work was taken for granted.
I participated in a thread recently about the relative merits of attending college. I opined in it that contrary to the OP's presumption, jumping immediately into bootcamp or into a startup etc., there are things to be had from a broad liberal arts education that you're unlikely to pick up elsewhere in any comprehensive away. The broader intellectual landscape of your culture is one; less important than intimate familiarity with any particular writer or canon is a sense that such things exist; and are always evolving in response to cultural currents.
Borges is so important a figure it is striking that he would be considered esoteric.
I imagine the same is true now for other giants of world literature, like Milan Kundera, or, Stanislaw Lem, or, Italo Calvino, all of whom still have a lot to offer a contemporary audience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose#:~:text=T....
#:~:text=I think it works in Chrome and Edge, but not in Firefox.
Indeed, it seems to be just those for now:
One other interesting tidbit that always intrigued me about Borges is that he became completely blind while he was the director of the Argentine National Library. In a strange irony, it became his own "Library of Babel", in the sense that he had so much knowledge within reach, but limited capacity to interpret it.
https://matiane.wordpress.com/2019/10/11/immortal-by-jorge-l...
Great story. Aleph is amazing as well.
Unfortunatelly, that translation failed to capture at least two keywords in the original: "patio" (courtyard) and "obreros" (artificers). Both terms have many overtones in the borgean vocabulary, both have heavy loaded connotations in his literature and in the Buenos Aires language.
"Humankind" for "hombres" is strange as well: I don't think "humanidad" was a borgean term; I do not know if there's a better way to translate "los hombres" though.
I do disagree about the artíficers bit, I feel that even when it is not a transliteration, it does carry the feel of manual manufacture
https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads....
If gets even more fun when you try to think about transcriptions of infinitely long things, like the digits of pi. They wouldn't find in one volume of course but so what? The number of possible volumes in the library is finite but the digits of pi are not.
https://youtu.be/MjY8Fp-SCVk https://youtu.be/Zm5Ogh_c0Ig
They're quite interesting, I think. The abyss really gets him going.
And a few more I really like: https://youtu.be/oca8BnDMin4 https://youtu.be/mexs39y0Imw https://youtu.be/aBBuoD9eL5k https://youtu.be/Zkv6rVcKKg8
Borges has another story about a map that becomes indistinguishable to reality.
On Exactitude in Science (I believe its this one)
... In that empire, the art of Cartography reached such perfection that the map of a single province occupied the whole of a city, and the map of th empire took up an entire province. With time, those exaggerated maps no longer satisfied, and the Colleges of Cartographers came up with a map of the empire that had the size of the empire itself, and coincided with it point by point. Less addicted to the study of Cartography, succeeding generations understood that this extended map was useless, and without compassion, they abandoned it to the inclemencies of the sun and of the winters. In the deserts of the west, there remain tattered fragments of the map, inhabited by animals and beggars; in the whole country there are no other relics of the geographical disciplines.
The universe could well be a simulation ... of its exact self.
Maze is another favorite theme of his.
Borges fractalizes the labyrinth, infinitely multiplies the interconnections between spaces — but makes all these spaces identical, cloned pieces of an infinite non-linear repetition, extending vertiginously into eternity, out in space and deep into the future, forever onwards.
> each book is unique and irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles - books that differ by no more than a single letter, or comma
If one were to try and distinguish one book of Shakespeare from another, they would need the full text they are looking for in order to be sure they have an accurate copy. essentially your key length is equal to the content length, and if you have the key already, the library contains nothing further.
I consider this as presaging the info-spam of an infinite, bot-infested internet: as more near misses of actual content is produced, the internet can contain measurably less information.
But the library also contains an infinite number of flawed attempted proofs.
I can't seem to figure out how to type this out in a way that maks sense but basically I'm thinking when an AI like GPT-3 is working its sort of sorting through the library of babel and finding words. Or when speaking its as though the library of babel is at immediate call in the brain, which sorts through near instantly finding the book that satisfies the next word. The website that allows browsing the library helps show what I mean, you can look on it and click random and search for information in it. The thing itself contains "no information" but it also does as in this case you may find something (first page I saw had the word 'beef')
I think maybe there are paths through the library that would prove useful for browsing, as is the case when I visit a normal library: I don't always know what I'm looking for ahead of time, I let the arrangement of books inspire me, see what books are next to the one's I already know.
I think it's kind of like a compression algorithm, you have the compressed data, and then you have the decoder. Any complexity the original data had is either in the data, or in the decoder. The library of babel is a pathological case: the compressed data is 0 bytes: whatever choices you make in finding the data is actually information outside of the system, as in: you might as well be making it up on the spot.
However, if the books in the library are ordered somehow, that is complexity being added back into the compressed data, and it no longer contains "no information"
In other words, you could never find an answer that you could say, with 100% certainty is accurate, unless you already knew the answer. You can't ask an unending database a question that you don't already know the answer to, because every answer is there.
Ask it, what is the primary atomic structure of beef? You'll get answers for anything. They're made of carbon. They're made of rainstorms. They're not real. You're beef.
So by saying it doesn't contain information, what they're really meaning is that it doesn't contain useful information. You can't do anything with it that doesn't amount to a wild guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
https://utopiaordystopia.com/tag/claude-shannon-a-mathematic...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Short-Stay-Hell-Steven-Peck/dp/098374...
To paraphrase The Incredibles: when every book is there, no book is there.
> I found I could recall every detail of my life; every event ever experienced I could remember with perfect clarity. I could remember every word on every page I'd ever read. Every conversation. Every tax form I'd ever filled out. I could reconstruct every second of every day I'd been alive from the moment of my birth until the day I finally shut my eyes at the end.
> This clarity of memory surprised me the first time I tried reviewing the past, but it was all there. (This was to be the greatest curse of Hell. Sometimes I would reply my entire life again and again for thousands of years. Remembering all the things I could have done differently, all the things... No. I won't go there now. I must tell this story).
https://www.mboxdrive.com/Library_Of_Babel.mp3
(Originally from the "Let's Read!" YouTube channel, but since deleted: https://www.youtube.com/c/LetsReadOfficial)
http://www.danielmitsui.com/00_pictures/majid.jpg
(It’s the scene where biblioclasts throw books and even people down the staircases).
> The book The Broken Dice by Ivar Ekeland gives an extended account of how the method was invented by a Franciscan friar known only as Brother Edvin sometime between 1240 and 1250.[3] Supposedly, the manuscript is now lost, but Jorge Luis Borges sent Ekeland a copy that he made at the Vatican Library.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Does that show up what you're looking for?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/04/virtual-librar...
* 410 pages
* 40 lines per page
* 80 characters per line
* Not included: The characters on the front cover, maybe 15 on average?
There are 25 symbols.
So there are 25^(410*40*80) possible books, which comes out to ~10^1834097 books. Sufficed to say, the library could hold numerous universes.
You don't even need the full set of integers to catalogue the library, let alone the reals.
Even though there are an infinite number of integers, there are an even more infinite number of reals, rendering the proportion of (integers)/(reals) to be near 0.
Someone should offer a public Library of Babel API that streams these books so folks don't need to store them individually.
Or, the library is limited but lives on closed and circular universe.
In my Lovecraftian phase I imagined an infinite winding black pagoda with brail inscriptions on its walls. If you're very lucky you would wander up or down until you died of thirst reading nothing but nonsense. If you weren't you'd find the necronomicon or worse. Unlike the library the text would not be finite and there would be no limit to the eldritch horrors you could find within.