Have We Said Everything There Is To Say?

[Turtle]

Before throwing my pennies into this interesting thread, I feel compelled (and inspired by Turtles preceding exercise in systematic counting) to include a reference to Borges 1941 short story The Library of Babel. One of many full English translation and pretty illustration of it can be read and viewed here.

 

I imagine lot of us hypographers read this long ago, others more recently. Anybody who hasn’t, I urge to take 10 minutes and do so now. This is one of those stories that tends to lurk just below the surface of you conscious mind, to be dredged up by thoughts like those this thread invokes.

 

The Library – which, assuming the “general theory of the Library” is correct, is contained in a finite, shirtsleeve-comfortable space larger than our visible universe - is an intense thought experiment, with much to suggest on the subject of information.

 

kudos to you for getting me to read some fiction craig. it's been a decade if it's been a day.

 

kastigations on the author however, on at least 2 points. :hammer:

 

each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color.

 

so...410*40*80=1,312,000 characters per book. but them jorge says:

the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books. One which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit fifteen ninety-four was made up of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the last. ...

 

clearly, the book his father saw is easily understood as a number of at least 1,312,000 digits. :doh: determining in what base the number is written, is a book of course of a different cover.

 

i also take issue with jorge first describing the hexagons as identical, but then going on to talk about them as if they were indexed/addressed. clearly the hexagons are not identical if they are indexed. :naughty:

 

anyway, as the rest of my thoughts may be found in the library, i'll leave it to you librarians to find them out if you have an interest.

[blamski]

 

This reaction can arise because Shakespeare's words got written down and preserved for all time in print. Suppose they hadn't been - suppose we were living in a pre-literate society. His words would've been forgotten within, say 1,000 years. Then future dramatists would be free to re-invent the complete text of "Hamlet". And it would be a fresh new thing, for them and for their audiences.

 

i want to say something here about cultures with oral traditions - the australian aborigines being a choice one - but haven't got time to write a proper post right now. thought i'd throw this out there anyway... and try and expand on it later.

[CraigD]

kudos to you for getting me to read some fiction craig. it's been a decade if it's been a day.

I’m hopeful I’ve done a service introducing a deep thinker about numbers to The Library of Babel. Though a short story and a simple idea, along with several of Borges’s others, the “library of every possible book” idea is a profoundly influential one. Of course, the idea predates Borges’s story, but his popularization of it stands out.

 

kastigations on the author however, on at least 2 points. :hammer:

…

clearly, the book his father saw is easily understood as a number of at least 1,312,000 digits. :doh: determining in what base the number is written, is a book of course of a different cover.

The base is generally taken to be 25 (including spaces and punctuation), giving the number of books in the Library [imath]N = 25^{1312000} \dot= 10^{1834097.29}[/imath], or more catchily, [imath]10^{10^6} < N < 10^{10^7}[/imath]. This is a ridiculously large number – by comparison, a common estimate for the number of atoms in the observable universe is 10⁸⁰ – which is why I take Borges’s Library as purely a thought experiment and several kinds of allegory, not any species of speculative fiction.

 

i also take issue with jorge first describing the hexagons as identical, but then going on to talk about them as if they were indexed/addressed. clearly the hexagons are not identical if they are indexed. :naughty:

I believe the description is intended to depict the Library as consisting of a vast number of identical hexagonal rooms (though other floorplans would work as well), interconnected in 3 dimensions (by halls and stairs), with, by definition, different contents. The narrator’s room indexing scheme is, I think, a relative one of his own invention, counting floors upward/downward and left/right from the one where he believes he was born. The story is short, and such details are left to the reader’s imagination.

 

The The Library of Babel’s unnamed narrator’s main naughtiness, IMHO, is his sloppy doubletalk about the Library being both infinite and finite. In his 1995 toung-in-cheek “sequil” to Borges’s story, The Net of Babel, physicist-turned-SF-writer David Langford has a later-day Librarian (computerized, now ;)) narrator comment on this mental sloppiness well:

Certain commentators had fallen into the easy error of describing the Library as infinite, thus failing to grasp the true enormity of its magnitude. As it has been written, the Library was never infinite but something more dreadful: exhaustive, all-encompassing. Such words as infinity are too often scrawled as a magical charm against thought. Those terrible hierarchies of the finite can break the mind as the bland infinity symbol does not.

My irkedness is assuaged by reminding myself that, as is almost always the case with a 1st person narrator, the narrator is an unreliable one: a semi-insane forced asocial introvert and individual of a dying, degenerate human population and culture – allegory for the perils of “information overload” on society, I think.

 

My main criticism of Borges’s story, purely from a reader-friendliness perspective, is that, while his narrator briefly explains that while every room of the Library has a small closet in which to “satisfy one's fecal necessities”, no mention is made of how Librarians get food and drink down their gullets to produce said feces. It’s implied that the Librarians are ordinary humans, breathing, reproducing, etc. in the usual way, so surely must eat and drink as usual. I’ve long found this omission puzzling, and tend to mentally add some sort of small water and food dispenser to my personal image of the Library.

 

anyway, as the rest of my thoughts may be found in the library, i'll leave it to you librarians to find them out if you have an interest.

LOL! Yeah, that's the key point of the story, and a major one in the whole history of ideas.

[LaurieAG]

The base is generally taken to be 25 (including spaces and punctuation), giving the number of books in the Library [imath]N = 25^{1312000} \dot= 10^{1834097.29}[/imath], or more catchily, [imath]10^{10^6} < N < 10^{10^7}[/imath]. This is a ridiculously large number – by comparison, a common estimate for the number of atoms in the observable universe is 10⁸⁰ – which is why I take Borges’s Library as purely a thought experiment and several kinds of allegory, not any species of speculative fiction.

There are also only 25 characters used in the book so the figure is probably symbolic.

 

These two signs, the space and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet are the twenty-five symbols considered sufficient by this unknown author. (Editor's note.)

[lawcat]

I think i just plagiarized someone. (oops again.)

[Turtle]

...

My main criticism of Borges’s story, purely from a reader-friendliness perspective, is that, while his narrator briefly explains that while every room of the Library has a small closet in which to “satisfy one's fecal necessities”, no mention is made of how Librarians get food and drink down their gullets to produce said feces. It’s implied that the Librarians are ordinary humans, breathing, reproducing, etc. in the usual way, so surely must eat and drink as usual. I’ve long found this omission puzzling, and tend to mentally add some sort of small water and food dispenser to my personal image of the Library.

...

 

i read your wiki link before the story, and there the article author says "Borges's narrator describes how his universe consists of an enormous expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves."

 

i got the impression from that, that i would read about a stove & sink in the story or some such as you say. maybe jorge just has a secret scatalogical fetish as walt disney was alleged to have had. funny too we must sleep standing up and apparently can't pee. i choose to sleep in the hall and pee over the rail.

 

i would like to excuse the author in considering he was writing for a popular audience, but i won't. jorge has clouded & clodded up an otherwise excellent vista. perhaps it was intentional, such as meaning some subtle reference to some self-similarity between the library and the story of the library.

 

at any rate, however you class it i give the writing a solid 3. what do you think of that dead guy jorge if that's even your real name!? i leave it to someone else to see if that has been written before or nay.

Edited December 1, 2012 by Turtle

[pljames]

renogaw,

"it's not the words that matter, but the context in which words get used"

 

It took me a lifetime to learn how to construct words so as to be understood. I like simple and to the point. linguists bother me, for they think they invented the language. Did they ever ask the writer what he/she meant in the first place? Who invented the word question was a genius. Excellent post. pljames

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

interesting question

 

i ponder when there will be enough laws, there has to be some point right?

i understand in an age such as this, with all sorts of new things, we need new ways to keep everything safe,

but when does it end?

[Guest MacPhee]

How fortunate we are to be discussing this subject in English! That infinitly subtle, precise and flexible language. A language like no other on Earth.

Try translating the thread into French, or German. All the nuances, the fine shades of meaning, the richness of imagery, the English originality of diction, faded to pale shadows, or completely kaputted.

 

And suppose we were Chinese? I venture to suggest we'd have a fiendishly difficult job to adequately convey the thread-content, using the blunt linguistic instrument of logograms:

 

We say all thing now, we no say any more thing any more time, finish.

 

That is quite pithy though.

[ErlyRisa]

Yep - tis a sleepless night...

 

its why we did book burning.