The Library of Babel

Oh, this is where it gets really good.

We have to delve into the mechanics of the 1941 short story, The Library of Babel.

Yes.

The premise of the story is conceptually staggering.

Which is a terrifying way to live.

It is.

So the Library of Babel tackles the madness of infinite space and infinite information.

Right.

Yeah

... once wrote a short story called "The Library of Babel."

Yes.

And, uh, this is almost kind of a, um, sci-fi avant la lettre.

Yes.

Basically, it's a piece of, um, speculative fiction in which he, the narrator is trapped in the Library of Babel, in which, um, there is this vast infinite space where there are a number of, uh, vast and infinite, uh, books in infinite libraries.

And it becomes Borges' meditation on the idea of universal total knowledge as both, um, the aspiration to utopia, but also a vision of dystopia, right? Um, confronted with infinite information and knowledge, uh, there's no way our mind can, uh, comprehend that.

And so it, um, we all become delusional.

I think it's extremely relevant, um, to a lot of the things I'll be talking about.

Um, and I think it's, it's interesting, um, And recently I have seen quite a few YouTube videos go up about Borges' The Library of Babel, which is, you know, one of his better known stories, I guess.

Um, and I think what happened is that one person made a video, uh, a while ago about the library of Babel, and then that's just kind of metabolized.

And now people are just like imitating and, and recreating and reproducing what they see other YouTubers, um, produce.

Uh, I think, and that itself is kind of interesting and relevant.

So it was just really interesting.

There's this whole kind of order of simulation, uh, going on that I think is, uh, amusing and entertaining for sure, but it's also kind of relevant, uh, to, to the ideas that we'll be talking about.

Uh, so library of Babel, you know, it's a Borges story.

Badass.

It's like the Library of Babel condensed into and express not only in terms of alphanumerics, the library that contains every possible book, but the crystal that contains every possible reality.

I have riffed on this in my own science fiction book.

I call it the jar.

Though Borges was not interested in writing long books, he was an avid reader, recruiting friends to read to him after he went blind in middle age.

He said his image of paradise was an infinite library, an idea he brought to life in the Library of Babel.

Built out of countless identical rooms, each containing the same number of books of the same length, the Library of Babel is its own universe.

It contains every possible variation of text, so there are some profound books, but also countless tomes of complete gibberish.

The narrator has spent his entire life wandering this vast labyrinth of information in a possibly futile search for meaning.