The Library of Babel

The announcement by Google that they will begin digitizing and indexing the contents of the world’s great research libraries — a step in the direction of the “global virtual library” — inspired Andrew Leonard of Salon to think of Jorge Luís Borges’ wonderful story, “The Library of Babel.”

Leonard found the full text of the story on his first Google search (“Borges would be so proud,” says Leonard), at this url:

http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html

(His column is a good read, at http://www.salon.com/tech/col/leon/2004/12/14/google/ but Salon makes you jump through hoops unless you are a subscriber.)

Anyway, I was moved to produce the following summary using Mac OS X’s Summary Service:

There are five shelves for each of the hexagon’s walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; 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. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know that this incoherence at one time seemed mysterious. Before summarizing the solution (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic projections, is perhaps the capital fact in history) I wish to recall a few axioms.
…
Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon (2) came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a wandering decoder who told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These examples made it possible for a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.

Footnote: What, you don’t know about Summary Service? It’s in the application menu of most well-written OS X applications, such as Safari. To try it out, use Safari to find a nice long scrolly web page that contains the text of a single long article. Select All, then go to the Safari menu and choose Services–>Summarize.

Try it, you’ll like it! David Pogue said this was his favorite OS X feature. Why does Apple keep it a secret? Of course, the Library of Babel also contains all possible summaries of every book, many of them generated by Summary Service.