Why read fiction? One answer I return to again and again: to fire the imagination.
You might be stumped coming up with a short story that has fired the imagination in more ways for more readers than The Library of Babel by the great Jorge Luis Borges.
"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below-one after another, endless."
So reads the opening lines of this seven-pager. That's right, seven pages containing fifteen paragraphs, but one has the feeling all the many bits of detail within any of those paragraphs could gyrate outward to generate infinite possibilities. Sidebar: Take a moment to scan the multitude of artist's renderings of the library via a simple Google search.
For any lover of books across the globe, this Borges tale is a MUST READ (Link below). I'll contain my excitement by confining my observations to the following quartet:
ONE BOOK BECOMES BILLIONS OF BOOKS
Let's take a simple example: 500 of my reviews are collected into one thick volume. By a simple rearrangement of individual reviews, we come up with billions of books. How many exactly? Is there a mathematician in the house?
Anyway, you get the idea. Take a book you yourself might write - collection of reviews, essays, stories, poems, whatever. Now imagine how that one book could translate into an entire library of Babel. Easy as pie or perhaps I should say pi-squared.
INTERNET LIBRARY
Jonathan Basile created an internet version of the Babylon library. How many books are included? Jonathan notes if a user clicked through the books at a rate of one per second, it would take about 10 to the power of 4668 years to go through the library. Unfortunately, he continues, the earth will be consumed by the sun in less than 10 to the power of 10 years.
PHILOSOPHER CHIMES IN
In his analysis of the library in Borges' tale, W. V. O Quine wrote: "The ultimate absurdity is now staring us in the face: a universal library of two volumes, one containing a single dot and the other a dash. Persistent repetition and alternation of the two are sufficient, we well know, for spelling out any and every truth. The miracle of the finite but universal library is a mere inflation of the miracle of binary notation: everything worth saying, and everything else as well, can be said with two characters."
Is this overstatement by an analytic philosopher? To take one example: How about Concrete Poetry or a novel like John the Posthumous by Jason Schwartz where a critical part of the work is the exact placement of words on a page?
THE DECISIVE DIVIDING LINE
Eduardo Galeano bemoaned the fact a huge number of his potential readers are cut off from reading his books since they never had the opportunity to learn how to read. This counts as a tragedy in our modern world - large chunks of the world's population remain illiterate.
Link to The Library of Babel: https://sites.evergreen.edu/political...
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