Borges

Please find below an essay I wrote on Borges’ “The Library of Babel.”

This Library is made of hexagonal rooms, filled with books with a specific length, written with letters according to a structure of infinity. But its impossibility is everywhere. Where did the library come from? Why is there every indication that it is the only space that exists? Our own universe obeys laws which are stringent and unalterable. Every movement has an equal reaction. How then is it possible it could have ever begun?

The Library seemed to me an allegory of our own world, a dream world, or a construction of the imagination. Our unknown author describes “the gnostic gospel of the Basilides,” “the treatise Bede could have written (115),” Portuguese, Yiddish, and the “Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guaraní (114).” These references to human language and history break the fundamental concept of the Library: that there is nothing else, that it is the universe. Can there be something before the Library, as there must have been something before the origin of our universe? Was it Earth? If so, was history imbued into the souls of the Librarians?

I searched through the text for indications of paradox, impossibility, and deception. There is a famous librarian’s encounter with two pages of homogenous text which is spread throughout the library and analyzed. Some guess it’s Portuguese, others Yiddish. Someone finally determines that it is Guaraní. Yet the Librarians’ knowledge of Guaraní contradicts the language itself. To know of it is to know of additional letters; this is impossible from within the Library.

The paradox of reference arose because of what we didn’t know. We did not know history. We might not have known the world well enough. Yet the paradox of language arose from what we did know. It is more disquieting. It might suggest that the Library is by design impossible.

On the second page of the story, an editor’s note remarks upon the “limited” punctuation of the original text, implying that an editor found this story in the same language as the Library and edited it into modern form. Does our author then pretend to be from the Library? Is the author insane? Or is the author indeed from this other universe and reached our own?

Laws determine our universe: the speed of light, the amount of charge in an electron, the quantity of energy that can be exchanged in a body. For an inexplicable reason, these are specific constants. Simulations have been conducted to investigate the form of the universe if we changed these constants. Results have shown that practically any other combination would have resulted in a universe that collapsed in on itself.

I’ve found impossibility in my own life. Certainty that has guided me as constants have guided the universe; I have been led down paths I don’t understand, brought to people who have deceived me and to those whom I have deceived, brought to moments of epiphany that are ultimately false.

Every theory of the origin of the universe has contradicted something about what we know for certain. Is there a constant, not yet discovered, that builds paradox into the universe? Has Borges found it, and written it into “The Library”?

As I wrote this I dreamt of Labyrinths and came to understand them better. To a mind that is so feeble, all the fabric of reality is a Labyrinth. Life is sometimes non-deterministic. A left turn is a right, or a left, or neither, and most everything is wholly unpredictable. Borges wrote of labyrinths in such varied forms that we cannot assume his writing is for the purpose of describing their permutations alone. Rather, perhaps, it is to describe their significance in our own lives, to find the way people interact with their own confusion, despair, and dreams.

The Library is static, like the universe is static in its form, and through this medium we all move, and we bring emotion and history along with ourselves. A long time before the writing of this story a period of infancy and hope grows in the Library, overpopulation and crowding and desire for life.

In this time there is hope that there exists some master book, a compendium and cipher of all other books, perhaps discovered by a “Book-Man,” who would be lauded as profound and messianic. I too have hoped in every book I’ve ever read that it is the compendium of all other books. It is my disappointment that has kept me reading.

“Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification (117).” It isn’t book that the author searches for, it’s the single moment of its discovery. The effect of this the book isn’t important; the fact that our existence is not in vain, is.

I do not need to know the exact value of the constants. I need to know that the very paradox, sublimity, and deception that defines my life as it does a labyrinth did not define the origin of the universe.

I read the Librarians’ contemplation of infinity and imagined what it would be like to experience all information in the universe—maybe not dissimilar to the discovery of the library’s totality: “unbounded joy.” All truth, all eloquent solutions to every man’s problem existed somewhere, and “the universe was justified… (115)”

Perhaps then there might be “…books of apologiæ and prophecies that would vindicate for all time the actions of every person in the universe and that held wondrous arcana for men’s futures (115).” We are offered these books as the “vindication” of our lives, not just proof of validity, but acquittal of wrongdoing.

Let us imagine that from our constants we derive others, and others to describe these, until there is a constant for every molecule, a constant for every atom and electron and smallest level of matter there is. Let us measure them across an instant of time. I am certain we would be able to predict the future.

The “infidels” among us find “’the feverish Library, whose random volumes constantly threaten to transmogrify into others, so that they affirm all things, deny all things, and confound all things, like some mad and hallucinating deity (117).’” Our author indicates that the opinion to follow is a doctrine, it is religious, based in holy and untouchable truth—why else would those who disagree be termed “infidels”?

Butterflies have often featured in accounts of battles—they are found in still air, drinking minerals from puddles of blood. The world is a strangle place. I once dreamed it was an infinite rolling hill that buckled under eternal earthquakes. Is the butterfly sublime or disgusting?

The ark of hope, vindication, and dreams slowly fall… By the writing of the story “epidemics, heretical discords, pilgrimages that inevitably degenerate into brigandage have decimated the population (118).”

If the Library could be traversed and books could be found, understood, then the reader would be omniscient. If we could derive every constant, we might become indistinguishable from all information and thus live eternally in time. But access to this infinity would require transforming into some God. So the Librarians despair, they murder, they kill themselves. Perhaps the reason they need vindication is the same as why they so violently perish: some sin of theirs’ pulls at them unceasingly to justify their lives, yet they can only ruin them.

Territory becomes bizarre and unapproachable as we reach the end of Borges’ story. Our author gives a final, abstract doctrine as rebuttal to the infidels’ claim: the incoherency of the Library is a language known by it, “foreseen” by it, filled with “tenderness and terror,” written in words such that every syllable is the name of a God (117).

We are at the border of interpretation, where the abstractness of ideas makes them nearly meaningless. Gods’ names are written on the covers of books, incantations within their pages. Everything is our own vindication; every syllable is nonsensical and empty. There is no possibility of interpretation. We are wrong, the infidels too.

“Methodical composition distracts me from the present condition of humanity (118).”

Some traveler walks up and down staircases and through hexagonal rooms in the infinite Library, reading the non-infinite variations of books until they become order.

“The Library is unlimited but periodic (118).”