The Universe is a Library

     The Library of Babel can be a confusing story to read.  This story is full of strange descriptions of strange rooms filled with strange books, the contents of which are debated over by strange people with strange philosophies.  Such a stretch of imagination can be a little overwhelming.  This story also deals with opposites and conflicting views.  When I first approach a text such as this one, I do not worry about real-world implications or deeper symbolic meaning.  Instead, I enjoy the story simply for what is printed on the page. Somewhere within the imagination of Jorge Luis Borges, there is a universe entirely comprised of books.  On face value, this sounds like a place where I would be very happy.

     This vast library is made of identical hexagonal shaped rooms, each containing shelves filled with books, a bathroom, and a closet where people sleep standing up.  Besides having to sleep standing up, the lack of a kitchen apparently never bothers anyone.  These connected hexagons apparently go on forever, “The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.”  In traveling forever, one would still never reach the end of the library, although some speculate on the possibility that an infinite traveler making his way in the same direction would at some point reach a place where he has already been.  Thus dealing with the conflicting relationship between infinity and inevitable limitations, the unnamed narrator proclaims, “I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite.  Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end -- which is absurd.  Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit.”

     The content of these books is another interesting point.  Each wall of every hexagonal room has five shelves.  Each shelf has thirty-five books.  Each book has four hundred and ten pages.  Each page has forty lines and each line has eighty black letters.   If there is some deeper symbolic significance in these numbers, I do not intend to lose sleep over it.  The letters on each page are in random order.  Some combinations of letters form great and meaningful works of literature, but “…for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences.”   Some librarians spend their entire lives attempting to derive meaning from meaningless jumbles of letters and words. 

     Another subject discussed in this text is the origin of the universe and mankind, a highly debatable topic.  As with other issues, arguments for both sides are presented, and readers are left to draw their own conclusions.  In comparing the theories of chance and divine, the text argues that “Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god.”  After these arguments are presented, a comparison is made which seems to favor the theory of divine creation: “To perceive the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these crude wavering symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book, with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical.”  From this statement, we can also infer that printers, and even typewriters, are unknown to the narrator of this story.   

      This story is definitely one which encourages higher levels of thinking and engagement. While it deals with contradictions and extremes, such themes should not deter people from reading it.  In approaching a story like this one, I first detach myself from this reality and look at simply what is written on the page.   This prevents a great deal of confusion.  After that, I go back and reread what was most interesting, or perhaps what seemed most contradictory or confusing.   From this method, I can enjoy imaginative stories like this one, without becoming confused or frustrated.