Author: Jorge Luis Borges

To read Library of Babel by Borges is to immerse yourself in a world where there are no lines drawn between what is reality and what is fiction. Concepts such as past, present, and future converge in a single instant in most of his stories. As mentioned before, infinity plays a fundamental role in his stories. As readers we are left to try to decode the nature of this concept and how it merges with reality. Reading Borges is a journey which is meant to be enjoyed one step at a time.



The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon’s six sides; the height of the bookshelves, floor to ceiling, is hardly greater than the height of a normal librarian. One of the hexagon’s free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery, identical to the first-identical in fact to all.

Each wall of each hexagon is furnished with five bookshelves; each

bookshelf holds thirty-two books identical in format; each book contains

four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately

eighty black letters. There are also letters on the front cover of each book;

those letters neither indicate nor prefigure what the pages inside will say. I

am aware that that lack of correspondence once struck men as mysterious. — Jorge Luis Borges

Jorges Luis Borges starts describing a library which contains every possible book that can ever be written. It is very difficult to wrap our heads around the concept of infinity. Borges loves playing with this concept in many of his stories from his book Collected Fictions. The Library of Babel is not the exception. The library is structured such that it seems to extend infinitely, yet he asserts us that it doesn’t and that also the number of books is finite. The books are 410 pages long and every book could be written with an alphabet of twenty-five symbols (twenty-two letters, comma, period, and space).



When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first

reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an

intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem,

whose eloquent solution did not exist-somewhere in some hexagon.

The universe was justified; the universe suddenly became congruent with

the unlimited width and breadth of humankind’s hope.

That unbridled hopefulness was succeeded, naturally enough, by a

similarly, disproportionate depression. The certainty that some bookshelf in

some hexagon contained precious books, yet that those precious books

were forever out of reach, was almost unbearable. — Jorge Luis Borges

In one of those 410-page books the secret of the library is waiting to be discovered. The catch is that there is no way to locate where this book is. Borges mentions that many people who frequent the library have spent their whole lives looking for this book just to come to the realization that they have wasted their years in doing so. Others have been driven to the point of suicide because the search made them go crazy. This concept makes us wonder if life is sort of the same thing. Most of the time we waste our time trying to draw meaning from mundane things which have no meaning at all.

We have a limited amount of time on this earth. Truth is that as we learn more about the world that we live in, the less we understand it due to its vastness. We are short beings which play in an infinite playground trying to accomplish tasks in the hope of finding meaning. Maybe we are supposed to discard the books full of gibberish as soon as we get our hands on them and linger a bit longer on the ones who we actually enjoy reading. In the grand scheme of things, we are better off holding on to what we find important and forgetting about not being able to find the key that will unlock all doors; and that if there is key at all.

Additional Resources:

Interesting article about why Jonathan Basile recreated the Library of Babel on the Internet.

Link to the Library of Babel on the Internet

https://libraryofbabel.info

Another interesting website that plays with the concept of infinity and the library

https://people.smp.uq.edu.au/MichaelBulmer/stuff/borges.php

Finally, a short review why you should read not just The Library of Babel but all of Borges’ stories in Collected Fictions.

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