Response to Library of Babel by Borges-- He is just FABULOUS

I just had to write in response to this short story—“The Library of Babel” was simply too beautiful and universal (including issues of the universe and otherwise) not to write about. At first, it was the allure of the proposal that, “there was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon (55),” and this idea that every existential issue, every theory, mistake, flaw, or solution, exists within the hexagon—on some shelf in some book. And, of course, “if the language of philosophers is not sufficient, the multiform Library will have produced the unprecedented language required, with its vocabularies and grammars (55.)”

Mathematically speaking, in one hexagon, there may be four billion, five hundred and ninety-two million letters (in black ink) used throughout the books in the hexagon. There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet that can potentially be used, and the number provided only constitutes a hexagon that has four walls of bookshelves with five rows by five columns, with 35 books in each section.

Then there is beauty in the irony of mathematics and its claim to encompass and define all that exists in the world, juxtaposed with its counterpart: language. Can language and mathematics be considered counterparts? Equals? Equivalents? Each discipline would define counterpart in its own terms. Returning to the Library, however, there is an extent to which language and mathematics are both inaccessible and intolerable in their immensity. Like the Library, that has too much information, often leaving its librarians in “suicidal despair,” these disciplines, like life, hold countless possibilities, until they are contained by their internal structures. In the Library, as in the universe, there are an infinite amount of sub-structures governed by their own internal grammars or laws, yet there are not boundaries for the amount of sub-structures or cultures.

The problem exists, however, in that human nature is always searching for an answer or a center to ground oneself in, so Borges discusses the Crimson Hexagon that would contain a book that would within it, contain the truth of all of the other books, and the librarian who reads it is a god-like figure. People begin to speculate then, that if this Crimson Hexagon exists (let us call it A), then there must be another source (B) that will lead to A, and then of course there must be another source (C) to lead to source B that will lead to the Crimson Hexagon (A)—and we see how this could go on forever and be an entire life’s journey that will lead to certain “answers” or “truths” that may not be particularly meaningful once they are found. The other idea is that if all books exist in the Library, then there must somewhere exist a book that is a catalog of the Library’s contents, and that the “Man of the Book,” a somewhat messianic figure, has read it, and followers must travel through the universe/the Library to find him.

Why do we need to find the truth and the pattern to all of the gibberish and nonsense in life? If we skipped past the parts that weren’t perfect or orderly, what would we have learned in life? Having a book that contains the truth of all other books sort of takes the fun out of reading them in the first place. If the Library contains all possible books (as in words, sentences, grammatical structure, and language) arranged randomly, then without the work of any individual’s mind, the Library may as well have no books. It is what the mind does with the material at hand that creates meaning, truth, and value.