The Library of Babel

I’m trying to get back into reading, so for now, I’ll be posting some thoughts about each short story I read out of my Borges collection, but hopefully I’ll get some novels in here too. I have quite the backlog of media to review, but I definitely want to expand beyond movies — I watch plenty of tv shows, anime, and read enough that I want to document that too.

On to this particular story — I think this story is a perfect example of how brilliantly intelligent Borges is. His stories always give us mathematical postulates and philosophical theorems and compress them into one dense analogy for existence. In this story we see the universe so clearly distilled.

This story does an incredible job collapsing metaphysics and ethics, semantics with philosophy of language. There’s something incredible about the way he manages to capture the whole of human existence and human history, along with every single deep philosophical thought you’ve ever had at 4am talking to your college friends in the dorm room into a single short story. Nihilism, religion, society, human curiosity, it’s all just a search for words. What a great analogy, too, because it often feels that way — that life is a search for the exact right words, the ones we want to see, the ones we think we need to see.

I love stories that have a philosophical position, and through precise storytelling make that the only way the world could work. I don’t care for thought experiments much, but thought imaginations! These spark wonder. And Borges argues for fatalism in the most terrifying and precise way: the very existence of an infinite existence is proof in itself of the saying that there is nothing new under the sun. Human action is infinitesimally small and the universe infinitely repeated. Disorder repeated becomes order, and at once the meaninglessness and the terrifying import of every phrase in the infinite library render all words unknowable and all thoughts unoriginal.

“There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god. To speak is to commit tautologies.”