Revisiting Borges' Library of Babel

I recently read "The Library of Babel", by Jorge Luis Borges, for a second time.

The first time I read it, many years ago, I remember finding it quirky and oddly intriguing, but did not think more of it.

Since that first reading, I have become a mathematician and a scientist. As the saying goes, you can't step into the same river twice. This time around, I was really amazed by the subtlety of this short text. If you like math or philosophy of science, I highly recommend going through it on a quiet weekend. It's available for free here, just 7 pages long.

I recall my younger self mostly musing about the odd geometry of Borges' Library, which is described as floors with identical hexagonal galleries, something like a stack of neatly aligned honeycombs. Similarly, I remember thinking about the numerical constants of this library universe; each book contains exactly 410 pages, each page contains 40 lines with about 80 characters each, and there are exactly 25 distinct symbols (alphabet and punctuation). Many inhabitants of the Library believe it to contain every possible book, so I calculated the mind-blowing number of books that would entail: something like 10 to the 1,834,097th power.

(Illustration by Alex Warren: link)

On my second reading, I find myself more interested in the human inhabitants of the Library, as they try to make sense of the universe they inhabit. They postulate Laws which seem to govern their universe, and build schools of thought based on reasonable assumptions, but they still struggle in deciding whether any meaning can be found in this vastness of books at all. There is this strong hope for meaning to exist, and people strive to find it, but contradictory theories and interpretations lead to confusion, conflict and violence.

The narrator, himself a scholar, is trying to reconcile two beliefs he holds about the Library; that each possible book is contained exactly once in the Library, and that the Library is infinite. He writes that "it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who believe it to have limits hypothesize that in some remote place or places the corridors and staircases and hexagons may, inconceivably, end -- which is absurd."

I won't spoil his proposed solution (although arguably it would not spoil much to know the ending), but it is both funny and interesting to me what he finds absurd vs. what is a reasonable belief, and also that he finds solace in discovering and believing in the existence of structure in his universe.

If other Steemians also find this story compelling, I would be interested in exploring it further in a series of posts! In particular, I would like to draw parallels to some actual human endeavors, such as science (esp. physics/cosmology), and perhaps to blockchains!