the Library of Babel

“The Library will last on forever: lluminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly immovable, filled with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret. Infinite I have just written.  I have not interpolated this adjective merely from rhetorical habit. It is not illogical, I say, to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited, postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairs and hexagons could inconceivably cease—a manifest absurdity. Those who imagined it to be limitless forget that the possible number of books is limited. I dare insinuate the following solution to this ancient problem: The Library is limitless and periodic” (Borges, The Library of Babel).

In his short story, “The Library of Babel”, Jorge Luis Borges describes a library with a “limitless and periodic” collection of books. All of the books in the library have the same exact number of pages and contain every possible combination of an alphabet made up of twenty three letters, commas, and spaces. Borges uses the library as a metaphor for the universe. Although logically the universe begins and ends at one point or another in space; it is impossible for man to determine where these locations are. Our understanding is limited, and we cannot make sense of the “limitless and periodic” world around us. 

The lyrics of a hymn remind me of this concept described in Borges’s short story. This hymn, “If You Could Hie to Kolob”, also explores the idea of a “limitless and periodic” universe. The lyrics demonstrate man’s innate desire to understand the concept of eternity, beginning and end, yet his inherent inability to understand these concepts. The words state, “no man has found pure space.”

Perhaps both Borges and William W. Phelps are so fascinated by the concept of an infinity simply because in our current state we are unable to understand it. We cannot “find out the generation where Gods began to be or see the grand beginning where space did not extend, or view the last creation where Gods and matter end” nor can we read all of the books in the Library of Babel.  Yet both of these works seem to imply that at some point in the future man will have the capacity to understand the “limitless and periodic”, just not in his mortal state. Infinity is an idea which stretches the human mind to its limits. While we try to make sense of it we simply cannot comprehend it entirely in mortality. Both the library and the universe contain a secret somewhere within them—a code for the universe. It is just not yet time for that code to be revealed.