Text Exploration
The Library of Babel, described by the poet Jorge Luis Borges, is a picture of all of the world, all of knowledge, all of history, and all of the future. The first-person description of this infinite library presents its physical infrastructure as endless hexagons of endless books, and within that physical structure contains every combination of glyphs, words and ideas that could ever be. The library as metaphor is expansive, as it can be a reference to personal knowledge and knowing, to the shared knowing of people, or to a search for spiritual or religious meaning.
In the library, people search for and come across books; the search is endless, because the library is “total—perfect, complete, and whole.” This wholeness was identified and declared, and when it was announced, “all men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure.” Taken metaphorically as library-as-religion, the library itself is a single book, and the single book is a Torah or a Bible or a Quran; as in real life, when it was rumored that a single book contained all knowledge, “thousands of greedy individuals abandoned their sweet native hexagons… [they] strangled one another on the divine staircases… others went insane.” Knowledge, in the library, provokes, persuades, attracts, and encourages selfish exclusivity in the name of religious commitment, where “young people prostrate themselves before books and like savages kiss their pages, though they cannot read a letter.”
A modern read of the 1941 story is to consider the library as the utility of the internet, or as AI, or as an archive and cyberspace of digital information. It is a place of opportunity for learning and knowing, yet retrieval is often impossible due to the vastness, the arbitrary organizational structure, and the conflicts between constituents. Borges did not know of the internet, but the idea of a history that is recordable and available, and is also susceptible to rumor and secrets, is an accurate representation of being online.
Babel’s library can also be viewed as more base—a metaphor for a spiritual place of existing. Men, in this case, may be one man or all of humanity as one organism, and the library is our collective experience of being. Knowledge is not literal facts, but is instead a “certainty that everything has already been written”—a feeling of inevitability of life and death. This inevitability of the infinite is where the narrator begins, and ends: as he prepares to die, he sees before him a sublimity, and predicts that “my tomb will be unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite.”