April 4, 2024 • 55 mins
Today's episode is Guests Talk #3, and we're chatting about The Library of Babel, a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. My guests today are Varsha (from Reading by the Rainy Mountain), José (from José's Amazing Worlds), Susana Imáginario (author of Timelessness series, and booktuber at Den of the Wyrd), and Jarrod (from The Fantasy Thinker).
Join to my newsletter for bite-sized bookish deep dives: https://liviajelliot.com/newsletter/web/
READ MY INTERACTIVE STORIES:
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello everyone and welcome to Books Undone. I'm your host, Livia J. Elliot, and today we
(00:14):
are in for another guest's talk with a fairly unconventional, fantastic and utterly baffling
short story, The Library of Babel by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Before we go ahead,
let me introduce you to the group that joins me today. Hello, thank you so much for having
me. I'm very excited to talk about this story. I read it last night and it blew my mind a
(00:35):
little bit. Oh, hi, I'm Jose and I run the Jose's Amazing Worlds YouTube channel. Hello,
my name is Susana Imaginario. I am the author of Timelessness and I run the Dan of the Weird
YouTube channel. Hi, I'm Jared. I run the Fantasy Thinker YouTube channel and this story
was a trip. Thank you everyone for joining me. I'm really excited about this one. Before
(00:58):
we start, let me do the usual disclaimers. First, there are spoilers in this podcast.
The Library of Babel is an eight-page short story and the spoilers pertain only to the
short story. We will not be discussing the anthology in which it was published, the title
Ficciones. Second, what you will hear is our subjective interpretation of this story,
(01:20):
also biased by the time and places in which we live. Borges may have had many other intentions
and you may have a different interpretation. It's fine. You are allowed to disagree. As
a bit of a trivia, Jorge Luis Borges wrote this story in 1941 in La Plata, Argentina.
His career as a poet undoubtedly influenced his way of writing. Borges' works have contributed
(01:44):
to the philosophical literature and the fantasy genre and not only is he considered one of
the fundamental authors of magical realism, his works are often classified as sleep dreams,
exploring motives such as dreams, laboring and mythology. So, let's get started with
one question. One of the most common interpretations for this story is that Borges wrote it to
(02:07):
encourage other people to change knowledge, even though most of their searches within
the short stories seem fruitless. Any success will actually change the world in here. So,
what are your thoughts on this idea? Interestingly, of all the places I went to for the interpretation
of the story, I think I sort of latched onto one interpretation of the story. That one
(02:29):
sounds new to me. I like it. I can see how that might be true about the encouragement
for the search of knowledge. It's more, you're right, it feels fruitless. Maybe I'll talk
about my interpretation and we'll see the core of what's going on in the story, I think,
is a search for meaning in the infinity of the universe that is defined here, right?
(02:52):
Because people are trying to find meaning for existence, trying to figure out why humans
and what their purpose is here and coming up with various explanations for it. So, yeah,
perhaps that is the chase for knowledge, but I don't know that there's any encouragement
there per se. But also, I think what I found as I went through it is like a lot of parallels
to our own universe. So I just like, yeah, you wrote a different universe that's exactly
(03:16):
like ours, which I find fascinating. So that was what I focused my attention on. Yeah,
I'm curious to see what the knowledge interpretation fans are doing parts of the story.
That's interesting. That definitely gives you that sense of knowledge is to be searched
for, but knowledge is also seems infinite. And he also mentions that, you know, he's
(03:36):
preparing to search for knowledge, but also once he's dead, it's kind of unceremonious
and like as if that knowledge wasn't fruitful to him when he got it. And it's kind of this
contrast basically of wanting all this knowledge and this idea that it's so infinite that you're
(03:57):
also not going to get what you want. And so it's a contradiction, just like infinite and
not infinite, because he brings up that infinite thing a lot and he brings up that it can't
be infinite, you know, and so it's like a lot of contrast in a lot of the wording and
a lot of the which, you know, life, life can be like that. And so,
would you then buy into the reasoning or like, do you think one of the things that it's saying
(04:20):
or some of the characters in the book are saying that since we are pursuing the infinite
and there's no point, we're not even going to make a dent in this, why bother is that
did that come across at any of the things that people do in their journeys across the
library? It's easy to get that sense of why bother from the story. And I'm trying to look
(04:40):
through it and find that, you know, where is this like the very last line is his solitude
is gladdened by this elegant hope. So there is a sense of hope to be read somewhere deep
into this story. It's not easy to find because there's a lot of a lot of infinite and there's
not much resolution in what they're looking for. So somewhere in here and it's pretty
(05:05):
convoluted a lot of this writing a lot of these paragraphs. So it's somewhere in here.
There is a there is that elegant hope that he's trying to get in that I think he wants
us to get as well. There are two things that come up from what
you said. One, at the start, it is actually defined that the library is infinite. In the
second page, I think it says that the library has existed, have a turn it a something like
(05:29):
that, like forever. There is this whole discussion that the librarians are imperfect, therefore
make the books imperfect or the search for the books imperfect. What you made me think
of is an perhaps a different interpretation is somehow mentioned that the library is a
world and in that case, each exxon will be a person's knowledge, figuratively and literally.
(05:50):
In that case, at the end of the story, they mentioned that every event is recorded multiple
ways in ways that are wrong and in ways that are correct. So each book will be each person's
interpretation of the same event, because we may all be here on this stream, but at
the same time, we all have different interpretation of thoughts and things about that event. So
(06:10):
that's why there will be many books if the books are the people's knowledge.
I think I read this as a bit of a masterclass on how to take a real world concept and obscure
the hell out of it in an alternate reality. This reads to me almost exactly like a description
of our universe. So I wrote down a list of parallels I found like this. Of course, the
(06:34):
parallel universes where he says that, you know, that people go and burn books, but then
there are other books that differ by just a word. It's like the I don't know if we
had these interpretations in 1941 yet. There are some parallel world interpretations where
like you go and you make a you make a different decision, you split off into a parallel world
(06:55):
and things like that. So the different books that differ by just a word that reminded me
of that theory of the shape of the universe, where he talks about how the library is a
sphere and what every point is a center of that sphere, which not exactly our universe,
but like, you know, you could you could transpose that into some theories of the shape of our
(07:15):
universe. And then there's anthropocentric views of, you know, the world, the universe
exists because it's perfect in like the hexagon is a perfect shape for humans to perceive.
Okay. Which again, like you can transpose to some of the real world theories that we
have about the universe. So I sort of just latched on to that interpretation. And I saw
(07:36):
so many panels, which was amazing to me that he just wrote about our universe and all the
theories around it. But in this weird, strange world where I think like the letters that
make up the books, I think you could equate that with a periodic table and the books could
be stars. So like that was the interpretation I latched on to. I thought it was brilliant
(08:01):
every single thing that he did from there on. Why did I get into this tangent from what
you said? I'm trying to remember. You were talking about that books are people. Is that
the one I jumped off? Especially because he says that every book, it doesn't matter how
different it is, the underlying elements are the same, which are the same 25 letters. Yeah.
(08:23):
So at the end of the day, we're all the same. We're all people. Right. So that's why it
occurs to me that you could have like you could take this interpretation of what books
mean and then like really fan out and say interpret everything else in that context.
For yours, it's like books are people and like books are stars or books are just straight
(08:44):
up knowledge and you can interpret other parts of the story. I like that. Yes, my interpretation
now it's a bit outdated because I really love what Livia said about being different perspective
of people. So I got a very pessimistic view of the text. Sorry, it was about this, what
I had a more philosophical interpretation about the futility of trying to comprehend
(09:09):
the universe, how impossible and even pointless it is to try to know it all. It's probably
something there about the different perspectives in the different books. And then I went in
this little tangent while Varsha was talking. It's almost as if he foreseen the internet
because it's kind of like we have all the knowledge at our fingertips and it's just
(09:30):
all bias from whatever is the plus and we can't find anything. And when we do find anything,
we don't know if it's real. Let's not even get into AI. But yes, I think we are not built
to actually understand everything, even if we had all the knowledge at our disposition
in this library or computer or whatever our brains. I think that's a very cool interpretation
(09:52):
that impossibility of finding the books within the library correlates to our impossibility
of understanding everything. I think it's in general, everything we do is quite anthropocentric
at the end of the day, because that's humanity's shared perspective. But this one makes so
many parallelisms. And if you take it in that way, it's afterwards, it will mean like everything
(10:16):
a person learns, it remains in the library or it may be lost in that hexagon without
a librarian that cannot be found, such as the knowledge of a person who lived and died
and never left anything written. I think I lean more towards Susanna's take. I'm not
very familiar with Borkes' work, but I think he has some kind of, it's not the first time
(10:39):
that I read something by him, where he's got some mathematical leanings and some sort of
interest in mathematics. And there's a lot of mathematics throughout this story, because
it's not just, you know, he's chosen the hexagon for a very particular reason in the sense
that the hexagon is the most efficient beauty shape that would tessellate any surface. That's
why bees make beehives in hexagonal shapes. And also he talks about the 25 characters
(11:06):
that make up the text, but he's very descriptive about how many books there are in each shelf,
how many shelves there are in each hexagonal room, how many lines each page has, how many
pages each, just a position of terms where he tries to convey the idea that the universe
is infinite. However, it's not, because once you figure out all the combinations and permutations
(11:27):
of these 25 characters in so many books, the knowledge is actually finite. It's just a
number that is way too vast for us to comprehend. So you got that contradiction there. And I
think that in general, he was just trying to in a much more fancy literary way, convey
the idea of infinity of the universe. And you know, the book, the story was written
(11:49):
at a time where there was major upheaval in the sciences, because just 20 years prior,
Einstein had come up with the theory of relativity. World War II was going on, and we were only
three, two years away from the atomic bomb. There was a period of the sciences being very
prominent in the world at the time. And I think he was just doing his bit to convey
that notion of the ever expanding universe. And I guess in a very atheist way, and I think
(12:14):
I agree with Susanna's take, like a very, we kind of comprehend that. And it's not,
you can rely on a superior intelligence or a God figure, because you know, it's just,
it's too vast a world to understand. And I think that's my interpretation of the story.
I think you have this library that contains all these books, each unique, and that's like
(12:36):
a direct metaphor for the, for the earth containing all people, each individual and unique. And
sure, you can go back and you know, we don't have the figures for it, but you could, there
was a finite amount of people on the planet up to this point is as, as unbelievably big
as that number is, but how many more people are going to be in the future. That is where
(12:58):
you run into the infinite, the number. And so there's your, there's your juxtaposition
about there is uncertain a number of books, but there isn't a certain number of books,
you know, and because this, this library doesn't seem to have the same kind of time strictures
that we have, there's, you know, that's, that's your juxtaposition. And so all these
interpretations and theories are all not mutually exclusive at all. It's all, there's room in
(13:23):
there for all of it. And that's, that's part of the beauty of the story. And also part
of the maybe frustration or complexity of it.
I love what you said about people and like future history, because then you could in
theory interpret the fact that the hexagons repeat themselves after a certain like walking
(13:45):
through this for centuries. And then the hexagons repeat themselves as like history repeating
itself like history, this notion that you could see human history and as some sort of
like, like having a periodic cyclic nature, not necessarily, but like, you might start
talk about the rise and fall of cultures and societies that could be a possible interpretation
(14:06):
with the repetition of the hexagons. I like that.
I wanted to follow up on that. I had that idea as well of history repeating itself,
but in a different way, perhaps, because what someone lived, another person also lived,
but their experience may be different. So just to give a very common event, one people
(14:28):
may be graduating and other people may be relating on the same ceremony, but how they
got there and everything else may be completely different. And suppose that someone's family
is there, but the other person is not. So they have also feelings affecting their emotions
so that in Babel's library will lead to different books, the same event, which not write different
(14:50):
things and they are both correct and both wrong at the same time.
There's also some meta commentary that you could interpret this text also, however you
want or something that makes you think, yeah, he's talking about this exact story that you
could interpret this however you want. Yeah. You who read me, are you certain you understand
(15:11):
my language? I think this in the passage where he talks about each person can interpret the
books that they read in their way. Like they talk about how they have allegory and metaphor
and even the nonsense, even the books that seem like nonsense, people have interpretations
of them and depending on the language and what their background is. So yeah, I love
(15:32):
that little meta note that are you interpreting me as the right way?
That's actually quite correct. For example, when we do the sci-fi masterworks discussions,
many of us oftentimes have very different interpretations of the same passage or generally
biased to who we are or what we have experienced. I mean, I think that's true of reading literature
(15:57):
or maybe reading in general, but yeah, I think to insert that specifically about this story,
because I mean, already we have like what five different ways to look at it that makes
sense that you would add that note about this story as well.
So the libraries give us a very optimistic outlook, but also pessimistic outlook. So
(16:18):
there is one moment in which it says that, yeah, the library has everything and therefore
I'm going to read a quote. There was no personal problem, no world problem whose eloquent solution
did not exist somewhere in some exagon, but they never tell you in which one. I read that
line as a bit of hope driving mankind or humankind, because we know that any problem could be
(16:45):
solved if we put our minds to it, that we are creative enough to find a solution. But
where is that solution? Who is the person that will think out of the box enough to bring
that solution? And that's perhaps what lead the librarians within the library to spend
so much time looking for it.
I think it's a tale of caution, because it goes on the different things that happened
(17:10):
and over the years and what people did with the knowledge. They were the ones that would
just give up and kill themselves, the ones that started burning books, the ones that
kept looking for that key book that had all the answers to the other books, et cetera.
If such a thing exists, if all knowledge was accessible, cautionary tale of who would have
(17:32):
access to it and what would they do. Because we are definitely not equipped to handle this
much knowledge and just the problems when knowledge falls into the wrong hands or just
when people set out seeking knowledge for the wrong reasons or under false premises.
(17:52):
There's also an additional comment there about you can try to be dangerous and try to destroy
books for instance, like there's a faction that goes about burning books, but you wouldn't
make a dent in the universe. The universe doesn't care, there are other books to replace
you and you're not even burning a percentage. So I think that that rides nicely what you
said with...
(18:12):
That it's pointless, the ability of your own... Yeah, but it still causes problems and I imagine
the poor librarian whose exagon got burned up and then you have to move.
Yeah, definitely. I think the small scale problems are big, but I think we read some
other sci-fi short stories recently where human endeavour seems so small if you compare
(18:32):
to the vastness of the universe. So I love that little juxtaposition too, that there
are all these big deal things, people seeking knowledge and so on. But also you can go burn
books, that's fine, you destroy your planet, but the rest of the universe will survive.
And there's also some sense that even if you're not, if you have a search for knowledge,
(18:52):
even if you're not the one who finds it, there's a sense that it's still there for somebody
else to find. So take out the individual aspect of the ego of having it having to be you and
let it carry on as a slight glimmer of hope that he mentions at the end of the story.
(19:17):
I think combined with other parts of the story, this would be a positive outlook, what Jared
said and what Livia said earlier, because it's not clear whether this is just the narrator's
theory or if it's established about this universe, that all you need to know is that a book is
possible and you know that it exists in the library. Combine that with the search for
knowledge, the ultimate knowledge that it is possible and it exists.
(19:42):
But it's cautionary too, because he warns against superstition, he warns against the
man of the book, which is someone who would equate to God, and he warns against young
men frustrating themselves before books and kissing the pages in a barbarous manner.
Without actually reading the book.
(20:04):
Which is kind of, you could equate that with some religious texts today, how many people
follow these texts but never read them. Those cautionaries are all in there as well.
I wanted to touch on that point exactly about the people that don't read or the librarians
that don't read the book. He actually makes quite a long point about it and there is a
(20:26):
division, it appears to be a division of people between the ones that actually read them and
the ones that treasure them. I think when I was reading it, something that made me wonder
is how useful can it be to have that knowledge and actually don't use it, don't read it,
nothing, right? Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is pointless if you don't apply
it. It loses the meaning, which could be something of an allegory to have in the book and worship
(20:51):
in the book as well.
I'm not sure about that actually, because going back to the mathematics of the story,
many things in mathematics we did, we discovered because we could, and then later on we found
the uses for them. So sometimes knowledge for the sake of knowledge is actually good.
Just to give an example about imaginary numbers, the square root of negative numbers, they
(21:14):
don't exist. But then in math we go, well, let's assume, let's imagine they exist. That's
why they're called imaginary numbers. And then we do all these things with them. Turns
out later on, apparently they're quite useful for flying planes and stuff like that. You
don't know what the ramifications are going to be of what you're doing later on down the
road. I'm sure that when the first two computers were linked up together, no one knew exactly
(21:37):
what was going to come out of it, which is exactly what we're doing now.
It is knowledge still gathered to be passed down. If it wasn't passed down, it would have
been useless knowledge. So at least, even though they might not have known the original
purpose of what they were gathering, it was passed down. So that's a fine line, I guess.
(21:58):
I think it's also a perspective of time. If you are looking at it now and you don't have
the purpose of that knowledge yet, then you will say it's useless or people will claim
it's useless. But in retrospective, it may become very useful, as Jose said, that idea.
And there is one line that he says at the end of the story, but I suspect that the human
(22:22):
species, the only species, deters at the verge of extinction, yet that the library, enlightened,
solitary, infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless, incorruptible
and secret, will endure. So even after humanity is gone, our knowledge and everything we found
(22:43):
will endure in records, in radios and the waves, they are still going through the universe.
We are still streaming to the universe our knowledge. So even if we don't exist as people,
the knowledge exists. In that case, it wouldn't be pointless. It wouldn't be knowledge for
the sake of knowledge. It will be knowledge for the sake of existing through it.
(23:04):
I didn't notice it until you read it out loud, but he's saying the library is pointless,
incorruptible and secret. Pointless? So is he saying that the existence of the library
is pointless without the human race to interpret it? Is that about the knowledge that was streaming
out into the world that only humans who generated this can interpret? Or is it more the anthropocentric
(23:31):
interpretation, like the theories of the universe, that the universe exists for humans to populate
it?
Which is weird, because he also says solitary, because they are all isolated within their
exagons. But the point is interesting, because especially if you compare it to the line before
that was so hopeful that the knowledge exists somewhere, in that case, it wouldn't be pointless.
(23:57):
I guess it all depends on how you, if you take the library as a metaphor for the world
or the universe, then yes, of course, the universe is going to go on, no matter whether
humanity exists or not. Is that what the library is? Or is the library the sum compilation
of human knowledge?
Or both.
Or both.
So there was one bit, I had it with a question mark, because got a bit lost. It's when it
(24:24):
starts, when it was announced that the library contain all books, the first reaction was
about the joy. But then at the end of that paragraph, when it's talking about the vindicators,
and he goes, the vindicators do exist. I have seen two of them which refer to persons in
the future, persons perhaps not imaginary, but those who went in quest of them failed
to recall that the chance of a man's finding his own vindication, or some perfidious version
(24:47):
of his own, can be calculated to be zero. I had a huge question mark in front of this
paragraph.
Okay, now I don't know what you're talking about. So I'm posing the question to Jose,
because this is definitely Matt. At the beginning, I thought he was writing because he says that
the universe was justified, the universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited widths
(25:09):
and breadths of humankind's hopes. So that's when you justify the text. But it went from
there to Matt's and I don't get what he's trying to say with this. Don't go looking
for the vindicators, don't expect there's no future. What is your interpretation?
The thing is, when he's talking about giving those objectives to the library, and what
(25:32):
about solitary? To me, that's like we are the only, as far as we're aware, inhabited
with intelligent life forms in our non-universe, we are the only planet. So in this infinite
universe that is out there, we are alone, so far as we know. And I think it's only after
(25:55):
humans evolved to kind of the state where we're at that we've started that quest for
knowledge. We are a little bit different from other species because we have that capacity
to reason logically. So I think there's a tipping point to that. And that's maybe where
it's referring to that. Once we acquired that logical thinking process, we started questioning
why we're here, where do we come from, where are we going? And I think this goes back to
(26:19):
that sort of atheist slightly. It's not positive, it's not optimistic, it's not pessimistic.
It's just that this is what it is. And it's our inability to grasp or to accept that we
are insignificant in the universe. As Varsha was saying before, it's a view, the world
is so anthropocentric that we cannot comprehend that we really don't matter.
(26:40):
Well, is the vindication with a capital V, is that that's just humans trying to find
their reason for existence, the vindication of their existence.
Is that for a god, for a superior intelligence?
Or maybe that, yeah. Or maybe both. And is saying the possibility of finding that is
zero, computed as zero, back to your math. And there's also the treacherous variation,
(27:09):
which tells me that a lot of this stuff can be misinterpreted and wrongly seen as a vindication,
even though it's not.
I like that. I think I had an additional thing since we're talking about the vindications.
Let's say that this narrator is right about having found books writing up people's lives
(27:29):
who have come in the future. I think there's a slight question there about free will and
determinism. Then by extension, I think everybody would have a book documenting their life unless
we have reason to believe that those people are special for some reason. But I say everybody
has a book documenting their life and that's their vindication, so to speak. Then if that
exists in the world, then also I think it leads to questions of free will and determinism
(27:53):
in this universe, which I thought was a really good plan. It's not making commentary on it
either way. It's just there for us to ponder if we choose to.
I look at it a bit different because in the text it says that the vindicators were looking
for prophecies that will vindicate for all time the actions of every person in the universe
(28:17):
and that held on to such a kind of for man's future. So it's not a book recording their
own lives. It's a book that gives or provides the why they are doing something and based
on that, what will happen in the future. At the end of the same paragraph, the sentence
that Susanna pointed out, it says that people from the future go to the past to find those
(28:43):
books. I read that as a quest for what is the meaning of life with a twist, because
if we ask what is the meaning of life, we are expecting to find the answer somehow.
And therefore the vindicators will go in to find books, to find knowledge as a way of
explaining the meaning of life instead of crafting the meaning for themselves. If you
(29:09):
think of what is the meaning of life as an active thing to do, therefore your entire
journey, your entire actions through your life should explain or provide meaning to
you, right? The meaning is personal. These people don't do it. These people want the
answer provided by something else. Therefore they go to the past and find the solution.
(29:31):
The possibility is zero because what was the meaning for one person is not going to be
the meaning for oneself. Each of us is different and therefore you are never going to find
it. You have to craft it for yourself.
I like that. I like that very much. I think in a bit of an extension to what you said,
I feel like everything that is described about what the various factions do is boiling down
(29:55):
to the man's search for meaning, just all the different ways that people go about it.
For instance, some like to burn books to do it. Some like to go on long pilgrimages to
find the one book and others are looking for their meaning of existence in another book.
Others are trying to just come up with theories about how the library works. I think ultimately
(30:17):
at the core, I think this is what I started with, at the core of the story I think is
all the ways that men search for meaning. That's what is sort of documented here, I
feel like. Once again, I think it's masterclass in writing about the real world without writing
about the real world, because everything in here, I think every sentence here, you couldn't
(30:40):
really come up with the real world badly.
I agree.
He was always quite metaphorical in everything he wrote. Now, what are your thoughts on the
censorship within this? They have started telling that these people came in, they were
going through so many of the exagons and they were actually burning them or destroying them.
(31:01):
There is a paragraph that he says, and they were a sport owned by the holy seal to reach
some day through unrelenting effort, the books of a crimson exagon, books smaller than natural
books, books omnipotent, illustrative and magical. And then he goes to the book man.
So one way of reading it is yet religion, but could it be the unattainable, just in
(31:28):
a very broad way, the knowledge that is unattainable or the things that we are the explanations
that we are not going to find, you know, those questions that are too open, too rhetorical
to even have an answer?
Or is it that sometimes new knowledge renders all knowledge obsolete and people are reluctant
to accept change? Maybe it's a metaphor for that as the age of reason and science to cover
(31:54):
the age of religion and spiritualism. And some people will fight against that.
It's pretty good. I like that.
Thanks. That's my moment for the month.
You always throw those very interesting takes Jose. But it's interesting if you look at
it that way, because how many times in history, knowledge has rendered other knowledge useless.
(32:18):
Like we have the idea of the atom, I think with the before that it was an ether. And
there is always something that will change everything that came before and whatever else
we are missing. But in that sense, we will never find it either, because we can always
find more knowledge that renders prior knowledge useless or wrong. Right. It's a cycle as a
(32:40):
library itself poses.
I think there is also some Buddhist philosophy thrown in there. I think on the second page
of the story, I think, I mean, at least that's how I read it. It says, what mystics claim
that their ecstasy is revealed to them, a circular chamber containing an enormous circular
book with a continuous spine that goes completely around the walls. I mean, if you go with the
(33:01):
interpretation that books are people, then all people are one and all the souls meet
up to the supreme soul or whatever. But this philosophy, it feels a little bit like that,
maybe. Or the other way, I think that's more expanded on later on in the story. When he
talks about the book that describes all the other books, like that contains all the knowledge
(33:23):
that's contained in all the other books. Is that like the search for the unified theory
that combines relativity and quantum mechanics or like whatever Einstein was looking for
before he died? I thought, yeah, those were two other things that stood out to me.
Yeah. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, but not Varsha, you make that point. It seems
to me Borges really did have some sort of tuning to the science going on with his time
(33:46):
and mathematics that probably, I don't think many other authors seem to have. I think in
general, my perception is that authors are very well, some are very good at their craft
or they know a lot about their craft, but they don't seem to struggle the science and
the arts, whereas Borges seemed to really do that really well. I suppose there are some
(34:10):
sort of science, I don't know what's the word I'm looking for in English, propagators, people
that write about science to spread this knowledge, but they're not really creators of literature
like Borges was. Yeah. This story just read to me, like all the theories of the universe
at the time rolled into like this one story. There was one thing that caught my attention
(34:34):
when reading it. I haven't got the story with him, but at some point he makes reference,
I think it's to someone from the future and he talks about kind of the ethnic mix and
he describes sort of the ethnicity of this person. And it's such a weird melting pot.
He talks about their ancestry has been kind of quite recorded, but like a real mix of
(34:59):
everything you could think of in humanity. And it's kind of like, it reminded me of that
South Park episode where they get visited from someone from the future. And again, the
people from the future, this sort of weird mix of all the different races on the earth
and the stuff. And I quite like that notion of mixing different peoples.
(35:20):
Which then leads me to the question of how, because at any point in the story, there are
couples presented. There is no mention that there is any way for families to exist because
every hexagon has a single librarian that is a lone librarian and it appears that they
are all mean. That's another question of how they keep coming up, the librarians. If you
(35:43):
take it in a very literal way, at the same time, there is no idea of how the library
continues to exist, how more people come in. So when I read that part, it was weird also
because of how can it be that this library exists that doesn't have frontiers as we have
(36:03):
in our current world, yet he's using those terms and that idea to present this person.
Good point. I don't have answers either, but I have more
questions. Apparently they all sleep upright. So uncomfortable.
And then there's one bit where he mentions that one book, he mentioned his father. So
(36:24):
that includes, that assumes families, but never mind that we don't hear anything about
women or children. Yes. But he mentions the father. So how would that work if there's
only one librarian? It gets complicated. Hermaphrodite librarians.
(36:45):
They are all Athena, they were just born from their brains.
I would be apt, would be apt going with the metaphors of knowledge.
I got a bit hung up here when he goes on, after he mentions the father, that there was
a book with the letters MCV, perversively repeated from the first to the last. And another
(37:08):
much consulted in this zone, he made a point, is a labyrinth of letters, but the ultimate
page contained the phrase, all time thy pyramids. So I've been playing around because MCV, I
was like, oh, maybe that's Roman numerals, but I can't for the life of me create a correlation
between the number or pyramids or time in any shape or form. And I spend some time trying
(37:31):
to figure that one out because it then goes and repeats again, MCV, MCV, that 400 pages
of and varying MCVs cannot belong to any language. Some have suggested that each letter influences
the next and that the value of MCV on page 71, line three is not the same value. Why?
(37:52):
Why? Can someone explain?
If you get all the possible combinations of the 25 elements in those books, in those many
shelves and with those many pages, you're going to get nonsense. It's like that thing
about if you had infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters and infinite time, just randomly
(38:12):
typing, eventually they will come up with Shakespeare's works, just by probability.
So I think sometimes you get nonsense. And we try to explain it and we don't get past
the fact that it's just nonsense.
Well, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherencies that relates
(38:35):
to your monkey statement, leagues of it.
I'm just now realizing, I was wondering why there are limited combinations of words, but
I'm just now realizing that the books are all the same size that laid out pretty early
on. I'd forgotten about that. I mean, how are you saying that only finite combinations?
But I did have a question that I was hoping to pick the brain of some of the mythology
(38:58):
experts in this group on why is the story called the library of Babel? What about Babel
does?
Well, it's a very famous library. I don't know much about it.
It's the Tower of Babel in the Bible, in the Old Testament. That's when humans only spoke
(39:19):
the same language and they tried to build a tower to reach God and God got pissed off
because the God of the Old Testament wasn't very nice. And then he confused them all and
he made them all speak in different languages so they wouldn't unite together and be stronger
than he was. And then they all set away and colonized the world.
Which leads to why we have some books that are gibberish and that nobody could understand
(39:43):
them.
I see. So like all the languages, it's the reference to the languages that were born
out of Babel. Yeah, that makes sense.
Yes. Good old Catholic upbringing.
No, it was like that. That was brilliant.
Yeah. All right. And here we are. I think sometimes you think that the story maybe he
didn't sit down and thought about all these things when writing it. He just felt like
(40:08):
I just want to put my interpretation or sort of try to explain the infinity of the universe
to the layman through a story. And then people have just gone crazy. Like with the NCB because
I was just like, it's going to be a Roman numeral. It's going to mean something. It's
so specific about it that it's got to mean something. And then we are one of those and
(40:29):
then we become the people he describes. Maybe there's the ultimate joke. We become the people
he describes trying to find meaning to gibberish in those books, isn't it?
So yeah, absolutely.
He even types out a gibberish word. You know, it's like DHC, MRL or whatever it is. And
yeah, you may be right, right there.
(40:52):
I started reading this and I even posted in a forum, replying to Levi and Varsha that
I was very confused because I spent the first 10 minutes just trying to draw, to make sense
of what the library looked like, because I know you're not making sense. And then I realized,
okay, I'm going to put this on hold because I need to continue with the story and we'll
(41:15):
get back to the visualization because it was making such a big point about it. So I thought
it was an important aspect of world building and I just wanted to figure it out. And then
I stumbled again with the MCVs and it's one of those, I guess I just fell into the trap.
I have a weird idea about the MCV. Why is there a book that hasn't been yet released?
(41:40):
So it's in the process of being written. It's in the library because the library contains
every book that has been and will be, but it has not yet been released, quote unquote,
in the sense of it has not yet written in the language that all the librarians speak.
Or it's the sequence. It will take a time because we have a lot of librarians at any
(42:01):
point in the story, it is written or explicitly told that the librarians write books. So how
do the books keep being added to the library? So in this case, the book will form itself.
Yeah. I did wonder about whether or not the library is unchanging because it feels like
I got the sense that it is unchanging, that it existed like this and it will continue
(42:25):
to exist like this to eternity. And I think that's the first axiom that it gives us to
write that the library has always existed and will continue to exist. But I don't know
if that says anything about the volumes in the library or if it's just the physical structure
of the library. But if it's including the volumes that there's nothing unchanging, they
do talk about inventing writing and stuff. Do the things that they write get added to
(42:48):
the library or is that just, I don't know, sent into the abyss to become dust in the
library? Like, yeah, I think that's an open question unless, I don't know, did anybody
read anything that tells us how the library changes and has things added to it? I felt
like it was supposed to be static, but I don't know what point that would make. Maybe we
(43:08):
interpreted it the way we want. I'm still hooked on the MCD and what you said made me
think something like perhaps this is a bit modern, too modern to take on it. But what
if we assume that every book within the library is written by somebody, some librarian somewhere
that is not explained in this case, the books are unique because they are that people's
(43:33):
perspective. What if MCV is actually produced, not manufactured? It could be the result.
If we have a, this is 2024, if we read it in this way, it could be an AI written book.
But back in that time, MCV could be, I don't know, a book from a big publisher or something
(43:54):
that is very structured, very repetitive, formulaic even compared to the other books
that are written for art. It could be that he was actually trying to make some commentary
on it. And I'm making that point because he had a magazine that was published within Argentina
and that was censored a few times as well because they were writing allegorical stuff
(44:18):
that had some political overview. Perhaps he was complaining about that, on this story.
V is just a very formulaic, not thoughtful, not thematic book that exists within this
library. Can you hear that? Is Borges laughing in the afterlife?
(44:40):
We are never going to know. I just like this letter the most. 40 years later, we found
out they were actually the initials of somebody. Why is the punctuation limited to just a comma
(45:07):
and a period? Because the semicolon is ugly. No one knows
how to use them properly. And M dash is on the table.
No, M dash is not that used in Spanish. So in Spanish, you generally use a semicolon
only. But you do have like quote marks, right?
But if the knowledge of a book is as it is and you are not quoting other books and you
(45:32):
don't use the quote marks. Exactly. Maybe that's what it means. It goes on saying that
the books are in many languages, but every language has different letters, different
punctuations. The alphabet has different numbers of letters. So there is some inconsistency
(45:54):
here because on one hand it was written from a very Spanish language perspective. And on
the other hand, trying to take in every other language. I think it was not quite successful.
It got confusing. So it depends. I mean, I get what he was trying to do, but at the same
time. And I think he understands as well because there's a bit when he is mentioning that a
(46:20):
book might be written in Portuguese. Others said that it was Yiddish. And my comment was,
yes, because they are so similar. But it still goes back to the fact that every language
has different number of letters in the alphabet, if nothing else, even if you don't go into
the punctuation. Do you think all the languages are transliterated to these 23 letters in
(46:41):
the library for some reason? They will lose meaning if they are transliterated. Some letters
don't exist in like in the, in Portuguese, the NH sound is made up with an N and an H.
In Spanish we have the N with a tilde up top. So some letters don't have a one for one within
(47:01):
Europe. They are like Chinese, which doesn't even have an alphabet. Every word is a different
character. So I think maybe both have a very Eurocentric view of things.
Oh, I was saying like I sometimes type Hindi to my in-laws with English. So like Hindi
(47:22):
words in English. So I was thinking it might be something like that. But yeah, if some
sounds are impossible to make, then yeah, that makes sense. Maybe that's not the right
way to think about it. What is Susana mentioned, and I think she's
right on this, that it's inconsistent because at one point he says that the books are in
every language, but then he gives these very limited alphabet. We could translate and we
(47:47):
also have the books that are gibberish. Perhaps the, the writers or the character that is
actually narrating all of these, it's just talking about ghost spell. He's not presenting
a law of this is how the book is, but instead is this is how I believe the books are, but
(48:07):
he presents it as a law because it's just ghost spell and what he believes in. Therefore
it is law for him, for the character. So it could be that it's just misleading because
it's not true. And it's just this idea that the character has that it has to be this way.
Going back to the idea of the hexagons as the people's knowledge, we are all restricted
(48:29):
and biased, but what we know and how we view the world, therefore it could be the limitation
of the librarian main character that we follow. To bring it all full circle and make a lot
more meta. Is this an indication that we have an unreliable narrator and therefore we just
discovered that his knowledge is obsolete because what he says doesn't make sense.
(48:51):
Yeah, I guess it comes back to that sentence of, yes, but are you certain you understand
my language? You read me. Or I guess to add meta-ness to your meta question, Jose, does
one inconsistency make the whole thing invalid? Or I guess in math, yes, but in language,
(49:15):
can we say there are parts of this that could be true and other parts that we need to look
deeper at?
No, if you're applying propositional logic, which is meant to work in every aspect, no
matter what. So as soon as you get a contradiction, you know, propositional logic is there. So
you are meant to be able to talk about anything without knowing what you're talking about
without having a knowledge just following logic rules. You're able to make conclusions
(49:38):
or inferences. If there is a breakdown there, everything is invalid.
Fair enough. So if this is supposed to be a text that's placing the laws of physics,
then yeah, everything is wrong. But if it's one person's interpretation of the world,
then maybe there are some truths and other parts are not.
No, sorry, I was going to say, but that goes against, I don't know, again, this could be
(50:01):
my interpretation, but I think particularly in science, truth is objective. There's nothing,
there's no expression I hate more these days than when people talk about my truth or their
truth or your truth is like, no, there is, you know, the truth is objective. And I think,
you know, we should all and we could all agree on that. Obviously, you can have subjective
(50:23):
tastes and interpretations, but I think in the realms of science, there is no argument.
I think there is objectivity there.
Oh, that's true. Definitely. But what I'm wondering if is there's a difference between
incomplete knowledge and false knowledge, right? So could be that the narrator has incomplete
knowledge because of which he's making mistakes and giving us inconsistencies as he goes along
(50:45):
versus it's not an interpretation. It's just, yeah, he doesn't know enough. So he's confusing
himself and us.
Oh, yeah. Or he's making wrong conclusions because of incomplete knowledge. Yeah, that's
a good point.
Yeah, there's this couple of things in here. Like in the second page, he says the orthographical
symbols are 25 in number. Then later on, he says there's 20 orthographical symbols. And
(51:10):
a couple pages later, possible combinations of 20 odd, 20 odd. Okay, so maybe that can
be 25. But then somebody earlier mentioned 23. And so there's a bunch of jumping around
about how all this stuff is. Yeah, there's 22 letters of an alphabet. So there's a whole
bunch of jumping around about the number of actual symbols in an alphabet or letters.
(51:36):
But maybe he's precisely or purposely making that point that we discussed earlier about
our inability and our impossibility to understand everything.
Right. Yeah.
And then Rater is showing his inability to explain and understand everything.
Yeah, that makes sense.
If you read the last line, let me make the parallelism here. He says, if an eternal traveler
(52:02):
should journey in any direction, he will find an untold centuries at the same volumes are
repeated in the same disorder, which repeated becomes order, the order in cups. So he says
that whatever a state eventually becomes the truth, that's why he uses the capital. So
to extrapolate that to our discussion, the number of letters, it doesn't matter. It's
(52:25):
the number of letters. Therefore, it's correct.
It exists. So it's correct. So the library is the source of truth, I suppose.
But just cannot be incorrect. Something like that.
I'm just going to share what I think is the one of the bleakest things I've read. I underlined
it because I think it was the sentence that hit me the most. The certainty that everything
(52:50):
has already been written, annulses or renders us phantasm. I know districts in which the
young people prostrate themselves before books and like savages, kiss their pages, though
they cannot read the letter. This is so it brings so true, especially these days. I don't
know. It just already is. And that's when the story got to me. I stopped caring about
(53:14):
trying to make sense of things. And this is pretty much what I take from it and how futile
it is to actually know it all. We keep searching. We keep going through those accidents, trying
to make sense of things.
That is true. I'm going to take what you said. I want to give you all a very modern take
on this short story, which is this was an amazing, long and thorough discussion for
(53:40):
a short story that is only eight pages long. As a bit of trivia, there is a Reddit top
bottom that tried to enact the library of Babel. And you can go in there and try to
search for some of the books like the MCV book that we mentioned. I will leave the link
in the description. Go read the story. It's very interesting. But before we go, let's
(54:01):
do a round of photos with my guests. All the links will be in the description box.
Well, thank you. You can find my YouTube channel where I discuss mostly fantasy books and comics
at Jose's Amazing Worlds. And I also hold author interviews and discussions.
Thank you so much for having me, Livia. I'm sorry, the dog. She's thanking you as well.
(54:24):
You can find me on X as Kronodendron and you can find my books pretty much everywhere.
Period is timelessness. First book is Weird God. And check out my channel, then Weird.
First, thank you so much for having me, Livia. This was a blast. And you can find me on YouTube
at the Fantasy Thinker channel and you can find me on various discussions on page chewing.com
(54:47):
as well. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I
really enjoyed this discussion. You can find me on my YouTube channel, Reading by the Rainy
Mountain. The About Page has links to some SFF discussion and podcasts, including speculative
speculations where we talk about sci fi books. Go check that out if that's of interest to
you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. So if you enjoyed this
(55:08):
episode, please like, subscribe and feel free to comment with your thoughts. I always try
to answer. Also consider subscribing to my newsletter, which will get you into exclusive
discussions, read-alongs and heads up of the episodes, especially of the author's spotlights.
The link will be in the description. That said, thanks for listening and happy reading.
Hello everyone and welcome to Books Undone. I'm your host, Livia J. Elliot, and today we
(00:14):
are in for another guest's talk with a fairly unconventional, fantastic and utterly baffling
short story, The Library of Babel by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Before we go ahead,
let me introduce you to the group that joins me today. Hello, thank you so much for having
me. I'm very excited to talk about this story. I read it last night and it blew my mind a
(00:35):
little bit. Oh, hi, I'm Jose and I run the Jose's Amazing Worlds YouTube channel. Hello,
my name is Susana Imaginario. I am the author of Timelessness and I run the Dan of the Weird
YouTube channel. Hi, I'm Jared. I run the Fantasy Thinker YouTube channel and this story
was a trip. Thank you everyone for joining me. I'm really excited about this one. Before
(00:58):
we start, let me do the usual disclaimers. First, there are spoilers in this podcast.
The Library of Babel is an eight-page short story and the spoilers pertain only to the
short story. We will not be discussing the anthology in which it was published, the title
Ficciones. Second, what you will hear is our subjective interpretation of this story,
(01:20):
also biased by the time and places in which we live. Borges may have had many other intentions
and you may have a different interpretation. It's fine. You are allowed to disagree. As
a bit of a trivia, Jorge Luis Borges wrote this story in 1941 in La Plata, Argentina.
His career as a poet undoubtedly influenced his way of writing. Borges' works have contributed
(01:44):
to the philosophical literature and the fantasy genre and not only is he considered one of
the fundamental authors of magical realism, his works are often classified as sleep dreams,
exploring motives such as dreams, laboring and mythology. So, let's get started with
one question. One of the most common interpretations for this story is that Borges wrote it to
(02:07):
encourage other people to change knowledge, even though most of their searches within
the short stories seem fruitless. Any success will actually change the world in here. So,
what are your thoughts on this idea? Interestingly, of all the places I went to for the interpretation
of the story, I think I sort of latched onto one interpretation of the story. That one
(02:29):
sounds new to me. I like it. I can see how that might be true about the encouragement
for the search of knowledge. It's more, you're right, it feels fruitless. Maybe I'll talk
about my interpretation and we'll see the core of what's going on in the story, I think,
is a search for meaning in the infinity of the universe that is defined here, right?
(02:52):
Because people are trying to find meaning for existence, trying to figure out why humans
and what their purpose is here and coming up with various explanations for it. So, yeah,
perhaps that is the chase for knowledge, but I don't know that there's any encouragement
there per se. But also, I think what I found as I went through it is like a lot of parallels
to our own universe. So I just like, yeah, you wrote a different universe that's exactly
(03:16):
like ours, which I find fascinating. So that was what I focused my attention on. Yeah,
I'm curious to see what the knowledge interpretation fans are doing parts of the story.
That's interesting. That definitely gives you that sense of knowledge is to be searched
for, but knowledge is also seems infinite. And he also mentions that, you know, he's
(03:36):
preparing to search for knowledge, but also once he's dead, it's kind of unceremonious
and like as if that knowledge wasn't fruitful to him when he got it. And it's kind of this
contrast basically of wanting all this knowledge and this idea that it's so infinite that you're
(03:57):
also not going to get what you want. And so it's a contradiction, just like infinite and
not infinite, because he brings up that infinite thing a lot and he brings up that it can't
be infinite, you know, and so it's like a lot of contrast in a lot of the wording and
a lot of the which, you know, life, life can be like that. And so,
would you then buy into the reasoning or like, do you think one of the things that it's saying
(04:20):
or some of the characters in the book are saying that since we are pursuing the infinite
and there's no point, we're not even going to make a dent in this, why bother is that
did that come across at any of the things that people do in their journeys across the
library? It's easy to get that sense of why bother from the story. And I'm trying to look
(04:40):
through it and find that, you know, where is this like the very last line is his solitude
is gladdened by this elegant hope. So there is a sense of hope to be read somewhere deep
into this story. It's not easy to find because there's a lot of a lot of infinite and there's
not much resolution in what they're looking for. So somewhere in here and it's pretty
(05:05):
convoluted a lot of this writing a lot of these paragraphs. So it's somewhere in here.
There is a there is that elegant hope that he's trying to get in that I think he wants
us to get as well. There are two things that come up from what
you said. One, at the start, it is actually defined that the library is infinite. In the
second page, I think it says that the library has existed, have a turn it a something like
(05:29):
that, like forever. There is this whole discussion that the librarians are imperfect, therefore
make the books imperfect or the search for the books imperfect. What you made me think
of is an perhaps a different interpretation is somehow mentioned that the library is a
world and in that case, each exxon will be a person's knowledge, figuratively and literally.
(05:50):
In that case, at the end of the story, they mentioned that every event is recorded multiple
ways in ways that are wrong and in ways that are correct. So each book will be each person's
interpretation of the same event, because we may all be here on this stream, but at
the same time, we all have different interpretation of thoughts and things about that event. So
(06:10):
that's why there will be many books if the books are the people's knowledge.
I think I read this as a bit of a masterclass on how to take a real world concept and obscure
the hell out of it in an alternate reality. This reads to me almost exactly like a description
of our universe. So I wrote down a list of parallels I found like this. Of course, the
(06:34):
parallel universes where he says that, you know, that people go and burn books, but then
there are other books that differ by just a word. It's like the I don't know if we
had these interpretations in 1941 yet. There are some parallel world interpretations where
like you go and you make a you make a different decision, you split off into a parallel world
(06:55):
and things like that. So the different books that differ by just a word that reminded me
of that theory of the shape of the universe, where he talks about how the library is a
sphere and what every point is a center of that sphere, which not exactly our universe,
but like, you know, you could you could transpose that into some theories of the shape of our
(07:15):
universe. And then there's anthropocentric views of, you know, the world, the universe
exists because it's perfect in like the hexagon is a perfect shape for humans to perceive.
Okay. Which again, like you can transpose to some of the real world theories that we
have about the universe. So I sort of just latched on to that interpretation. And I saw
(07:36):
so many panels, which was amazing to me that he just wrote about our universe and all the
theories around it. But in this weird, strange world where I think like the letters that
make up the books, I think you could equate that with a periodic table and the books could
be stars. So like that was the interpretation I latched on to. I thought it was brilliant
(08:01):
every single thing that he did from there on. Why did I get into this tangent from what
you said? I'm trying to remember. You were talking about that books are people. Is that
the one I jumped off? Especially because he says that every book, it doesn't matter how
different it is, the underlying elements are the same, which are the same 25 letters. Yeah.
(08:23):
So at the end of the day, we're all the same. We're all people. Right. So that's why it
occurs to me that you could have like you could take this interpretation of what books
mean and then like really fan out and say interpret everything else in that context.
For yours, it's like books are people and like books are stars or books are just straight
(08:44):
up knowledge and you can interpret other parts of the story. I like that. Yes, my interpretation
now it's a bit outdated because I really love what Livia said about being different perspective
of people. So I got a very pessimistic view of the text. Sorry, it was about this, what
I had a more philosophical interpretation about the futility of trying to comprehend
(09:09):
the universe, how impossible and even pointless it is to try to know it all. It's probably
something there about the different perspectives in the different books. And then I went in
this little tangent while Varsha was talking. It's almost as if he foreseen the internet
because it's kind of like we have all the knowledge at our fingertips and it's just
(09:30):
all bias from whatever is the plus and we can't find anything. And when we do find anything,
we don't know if it's real. Let's not even get into AI. But yes, I think we are not built
to actually understand everything, even if we had all the knowledge at our disposition
in this library or computer or whatever our brains. I think that's a very cool interpretation
(09:52):
that impossibility of finding the books within the library correlates to our impossibility
of understanding everything. I think it's in general, everything we do is quite anthropocentric
at the end of the day, because that's humanity's shared perspective. But this one makes so
many parallelisms. And if you take it in that way, it's afterwards, it will mean like everything
(10:16):
a person learns, it remains in the library or it may be lost in that hexagon without
a librarian that cannot be found, such as the knowledge of a person who lived and died
and never left anything written. I think I lean more towards Susanna's take. I'm not
very familiar with Borkes' work, but I think he has some kind of, it's not the first time
(10:39):
that I read something by him, where he's got some mathematical leanings and some sort of
interest in mathematics. And there's a lot of mathematics throughout this story, because
it's not just, you know, he's chosen the hexagon for a very particular reason in the sense
that the hexagon is the most efficient beauty shape that would tessellate any surface. That's
why bees make beehives in hexagonal shapes. And also he talks about the 25 characters
(11:06):
that make up the text, but he's very descriptive about how many books there are in each shelf,
how many shelves there are in each hexagonal room, how many lines each page has, how many
pages each, just a position of terms where he tries to convey the idea that the universe
is infinite. However, it's not, because once you figure out all the combinations and permutations
(11:27):
of these 25 characters in so many books, the knowledge is actually finite. It's just a
number that is way too vast for us to comprehend. So you got that contradiction there. And I
think that in general, he was just trying to in a much more fancy literary way, convey
the idea of infinity of the universe. And you know, the book, the story was written
(11:49):
at a time where there was major upheaval in the sciences, because just 20 years prior,
Einstein had come up with the theory of relativity. World War II was going on, and we were only
three, two years away from the atomic bomb. There was a period of the sciences being very
prominent in the world at the time. And I think he was just doing his bit to convey
that notion of the ever expanding universe. And I guess in a very atheist way, and I think
(12:14):
I agree with Susanna's take, like a very, we kind of comprehend that. And it's not,
you can rely on a superior intelligence or a God figure, because you know, it's just,
it's too vast a world to understand. And I think that's my interpretation of the story.
I think you have this library that contains all these books, each unique, and that's like
(12:36):
a direct metaphor for the, for the earth containing all people, each individual and unique. And
sure, you can go back and you know, we don't have the figures for it, but you could, there
was a finite amount of people on the planet up to this point is as, as unbelievably big
as that number is, but how many more people are going to be in the future. That is where
(12:58):
you run into the infinite, the number. And so there's your, there's your juxtaposition
about there is uncertain a number of books, but there isn't a certain number of books,
you know, and because this, this library doesn't seem to have the same kind of time strictures
that we have, there's, you know, that's, that's your juxtaposition. And so all these
interpretations and theories are all not mutually exclusive at all. It's all, there's room in
(13:23):
there for all of it. And that's, that's part of the beauty of the story. And also part
of the maybe frustration or complexity of it.
I love what you said about people and like future history, because then you could in
theory interpret the fact that the hexagons repeat themselves after a certain like walking
(13:45):
through this for centuries. And then the hexagons repeat themselves as like history repeating
itself like history, this notion that you could see human history and as some sort of
like, like having a periodic cyclic nature, not necessarily, but like, you might start
talk about the rise and fall of cultures and societies that could be a possible interpretation
(14:06):
with the repetition of the hexagons. I like that.
I wanted to follow up on that. I had that idea as well of history repeating itself,
but in a different way, perhaps, because what someone lived, another person also lived,
but their experience may be different. So just to give a very common event, one people
(14:28):
may be graduating and other people may be relating on the same ceremony, but how they
got there and everything else may be completely different. And suppose that someone's family
is there, but the other person is not. So they have also feelings affecting their emotions
so that in Babel's library will lead to different books, the same event, which not write different
(14:50):
things and they are both correct and both wrong at the same time.
There's also some meta commentary that you could interpret this text also, however you
want or something that makes you think, yeah, he's talking about this exact story that you
could interpret this however you want. Yeah. You who read me, are you certain you understand
(15:11):
my language? I think this in the passage where he talks about each person can interpret the
books that they read in their way. Like they talk about how they have allegory and metaphor
and even the nonsense, even the books that seem like nonsense, people have interpretations
of them and depending on the language and what their background is. So yeah, I love
(15:32):
that little meta note that are you interpreting me as the right way?
That's actually quite correct. For example, when we do the sci-fi masterworks discussions,
many of us oftentimes have very different interpretations of the same passage or generally
biased to who we are or what we have experienced. I mean, I think that's true of reading literature
(15:57):
or maybe reading in general, but yeah, I think to insert that specifically about this story,
because I mean, already we have like what five different ways to look at it that makes
sense that you would add that note about this story as well.
So the libraries give us a very optimistic outlook, but also pessimistic outlook. So
(16:18):
there is one moment in which it says that, yeah, the library has everything and therefore
I'm going to read a quote. There was no personal problem, no world problem whose eloquent solution
did not exist somewhere in some exagon, but they never tell you in which one. I read that
line as a bit of hope driving mankind or humankind, because we know that any problem could be
(16:45):
solved if we put our minds to it, that we are creative enough to find a solution. But
where is that solution? Who is the person that will think out of the box enough to bring
that solution? And that's perhaps what lead the librarians within the library to spend
so much time looking for it.
I think it's a tale of caution, because it goes on the different things that happened
(17:10):
and over the years and what people did with the knowledge. They were the ones that would
just give up and kill themselves, the ones that started burning books, the ones that
kept looking for that key book that had all the answers to the other books, et cetera.
If such a thing exists, if all knowledge was accessible, cautionary tale of who would have
(17:32):
access to it and what would they do. Because we are definitely not equipped to handle this
much knowledge and just the problems when knowledge falls into the wrong hands or just
when people set out seeking knowledge for the wrong reasons or under false premises.
(17:52):
There's also an additional comment there about you can try to be dangerous and try to destroy
books for instance, like there's a faction that goes about burning books, but you wouldn't
make a dent in the universe. The universe doesn't care, there are other books to replace
you and you're not even burning a percentage. So I think that that rides nicely what you
said with...
(18:12):
That it's pointless, the ability of your own... Yeah, but it still causes problems and I imagine
the poor librarian whose exagon got burned up and then you have to move.
Yeah, definitely. I think the small scale problems are big, but I think we read some
other sci-fi short stories recently where human endeavour seems so small if you compare
(18:32):
to the vastness of the universe. So I love that little juxtaposition too, that there
are all these big deal things, people seeking knowledge and so on. But also you can go burn
books, that's fine, you destroy your planet, but the rest of the universe will survive.
And there's also some sense that even if you're not, if you have a search for knowledge,
(18:52):
even if you're not the one who finds it, there's a sense that it's still there for somebody
else to find. So take out the individual aspect of the ego of having it having to be you and
let it carry on as a slight glimmer of hope that he mentions at the end of the story.
(19:17):
I think combined with other parts of the story, this would be a positive outlook, what Jared
said and what Livia said earlier, because it's not clear whether this is just the narrator's
theory or if it's established about this universe, that all you need to know is that a book is
possible and you know that it exists in the library. Combine that with the search for
knowledge, the ultimate knowledge that it is possible and it exists.
(19:42):
But it's cautionary too, because he warns against superstition, he warns against the
man of the book, which is someone who would equate to God, and he warns against young
men frustrating themselves before books and kissing the pages in a barbarous manner.
Without actually reading the book.
(20:04):
Which is kind of, you could equate that with some religious texts today, how many people
follow these texts but never read them. Those cautionaries are all in there as well.
I wanted to touch on that point exactly about the people that don't read or the librarians
that don't read the book. He actually makes quite a long point about it and there is a
(20:26):
division, it appears to be a division of people between the ones that actually read them and
the ones that treasure them. I think when I was reading it, something that made me wonder
is how useful can it be to have that knowledge and actually don't use it, don't read it,
nothing, right? Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is pointless if you don't apply
it. It loses the meaning, which could be something of an allegory to have in the book and worship
(20:51):
in the book as well.
I'm not sure about that actually, because going back to the mathematics of the story,
many things in mathematics we did, we discovered because we could, and then later on we found
the uses for them. So sometimes knowledge for the sake of knowledge is actually good.
Just to give an example about imaginary numbers, the square root of negative numbers, they
(21:14):
don't exist. But then in math we go, well, let's assume, let's imagine they exist. That's
why they're called imaginary numbers. And then we do all these things with them. Turns
out later on, apparently they're quite useful for flying planes and stuff like that. You
don't know what the ramifications are going to be of what you're doing later on down the
road. I'm sure that when the first two computers were linked up together, no one knew exactly
(21:37):
what was going to come out of it, which is exactly what we're doing now.
It is knowledge still gathered to be passed down. If it wasn't passed down, it would have
been useless knowledge. So at least, even though they might not have known the original
purpose of what they were gathering, it was passed down. So that's a fine line, I guess.
(21:58):
I think it's also a perspective of time. If you are looking at it now and you don't have
the purpose of that knowledge yet, then you will say it's useless or people will claim
it's useless. But in retrospective, it may become very useful, as Jose said, that idea.
And there is one line that he says at the end of the story, but I suspect that the human
(22:22):
species, the only species, deters at the verge of extinction, yet that the library, enlightened,
solitary, infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless, incorruptible
and secret, will endure. So even after humanity is gone, our knowledge and everything we found
(22:43):
will endure in records, in radios and the waves, they are still going through the universe.
We are still streaming to the universe our knowledge. So even if we don't exist as people,
the knowledge exists. In that case, it wouldn't be pointless. It wouldn't be knowledge for
the sake of knowledge. It will be knowledge for the sake of existing through it.
(23:04):
I didn't notice it until you read it out loud, but he's saying the library is pointless,
incorruptible and secret. Pointless? So is he saying that the existence of the library
is pointless without the human race to interpret it? Is that about the knowledge that was streaming
out into the world that only humans who generated this can interpret? Or is it more the anthropocentric
(23:31):
interpretation, like the theories of the universe, that the universe exists for humans to populate
it?
Which is weird, because he also says solitary, because they are all isolated within their
exagons. But the point is interesting, because especially if you compare it to the line before
that was so hopeful that the knowledge exists somewhere, in that case, it wouldn't be pointless.
(23:57):
I guess it all depends on how you, if you take the library as a metaphor for the world
or the universe, then yes, of course, the universe is going to go on, no matter whether
humanity exists or not. Is that what the library is? Or is the library the sum compilation
of human knowledge?
Or both.
Or both.
So there was one bit, I had it with a question mark, because got a bit lost. It's when it
(24:24):
starts, when it was announced that the library contain all books, the first reaction was
about the joy. But then at the end of that paragraph, when it's talking about the vindicators,
and he goes, the vindicators do exist. I have seen two of them which refer to persons in
the future, persons perhaps not imaginary, but those who went in quest of them failed
to recall that the chance of a man's finding his own vindication, or some perfidious version
(24:47):
of his own, can be calculated to be zero. I had a huge question mark in front of this
paragraph.
Okay, now I don't know what you're talking about. So I'm posing the question to Jose,
because this is definitely Matt. At the beginning, I thought he was writing because he says that
the universe was justified, the universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited widths
(25:09):
and breadths of humankind's hopes. So that's when you justify the text. But it went from
there to Matt's and I don't get what he's trying to say with this. Don't go looking
for the vindicators, don't expect there's no future. What is your interpretation?
The thing is, when he's talking about giving those objectives to the library, and what
(25:32):
about solitary? To me, that's like we are the only, as far as we're aware, inhabited
with intelligent life forms in our non-universe, we are the only planet. So in this infinite
universe that is out there, we are alone, so far as we know. And I think it's only after
(25:55):
humans evolved to kind of the state where we're at that we've started that quest for
knowledge. We are a little bit different from other species because we have that capacity
to reason logically. So I think there's a tipping point to that. And that's maybe where
it's referring to that. Once we acquired that logical thinking process, we started questioning
why we're here, where do we come from, where are we going? And I think this goes back to
(26:19):
that sort of atheist slightly. It's not positive, it's not optimistic, it's not pessimistic.
It's just that this is what it is. And it's our inability to grasp or to accept that we
are insignificant in the universe. As Varsha was saying before, it's a view, the world
is so anthropocentric that we cannot comprehend that we really don't matter.
(26:40):
Well, is the vindication with a capital V, is that that's just humans trying to find
their reason for existence, the vindication of their existence.
Is that for a god, for a superior intelligence?
Or maybe that, yeah. Or maybe both. And is saying the possibility of finding that is
zero, computed as zero, back to your math. And there's also the treacherous variation,
(27:09):
which tells me that a lot of this stuff can be misinterpreted and wrongly seen as a vindication,
even though it's not.
I like that. I think I had an additional thing since we're talking about the vindications.
Let's say that this narrator is right about having found books writing up people's lives
(27:29):
who have come in the future. I think there's a slight question there about free will and
determinism. Then by extension, I think everybody would have a book documenting their life unless
we have reason to believe that those people are special for some reason. But I say everybody
has a book documenting their life and that's their vindication, so to speak. Then if that
exists in the world, then also I think it leads to questions of free will and determinism
(27:53):
in this universe, which I thought was a really good plan. It's not making commentary on it
either way. It's just there for us to ponder if we choose to.
I look at it a bit different because in the text it says that the vindicators were looking
for prophecies that will vindicate for all time the actions of every person in the universe
(28:17):
and that held on to such a kind of for man's future. So it's not a book recording their
own lives. It's a book that gives or provides the why they are doing something and based
on that, what will happen in the future. At the end of the same paragraph, the sentence
that Susanna pointed out, it says that people from the future go to the past to find those
(28:43):
books. I read that as a quest for what is the meaning of life with a twist, because
if we ask what is the meaning of life, we are expecting to find the answer somehow.
And therefore the vindicators will go in to find books, to find knowledge as a way of
explaining the meaning of life instead of crafting the meaning for themselves. If you
(29:09):
think of what is the meaning of life as an active thing to do, therefore your entire
journey, your entire actions through your life should explain or provide meaning to
you, right? The meaning is personal. These people don't do it. These people want the
answer provided by something else. Therefore they go to the past and find the solution.
(29:31):
The possibility is zero because what was the meaning for one person is not going to be
the meaning for oneself. Each of us is different and therefore you are never going to find
it. You have to craft it for yourself.
I like that. I like that very much. I think in a bit of an extension to what you said,
I feel like everything that is described about what the various factions do is boiling down
(29:55):
to the man's search for meaning, just all the different ways that people go about it.
For instance, some like to burn books to do it. Some like to go on long pilgrimages to
find the one book and others are looking for their meaning of existence in another book.
Others are trying to just come up with theories about how the library works. I think ultimately
(30:17):
at the core, I think this is what I started with, at the core of the story I think is
all the ways that men search for meaning. That's what is sort of documented here, I
feel like. Once again, I think it's masterclass in writing about the real world without writing
about the real world, because everything in here, I think every sentence here, you couldn't
(30:40):
really come up with the real world badly.
I agree.
He was always quite metaphorical in everything he wrote. Now, what are your thoughts on the
censorship within this? They have started telling that these people came in, they were
going through so many of the exagons and they were actually burning them or destroying them.
(31:01):
There is a paragraph that he says, and they were a sport owned by the holy seal to reach
some day through unrelenting effort, the books of a crimson exagon, books smaller than natural
books, books omnipotent, illustrative and magical. And then he goes to the book man.
So one way of reading it is yet religion, but could it be the unattainable, just in
(31:28):
a very broad way, the knowledge that is unattainable or the things that we are the explanations
that we are not going to find, you know, those questions that are too open, too rhetorical
to even have an answer?
Or is it that sometimes new knowledge renders all knowledge obsolete and people are reluctant
to accept change? Maybe it's a metaphor for that as the age of reason and science to cover
(31:54):
the age of religion and spiritualism. And some people will fight against that.
It's pretty good. I like that.
Thanks. That's my moment for the month.
You always throw those very interesting takes Jose. But it's interesting if you look at
it that way, because how many times in history, knowledge has rendered other knowledge useless.
(32:18):
Like we have the idea of the atom, I think with the before that it was an ether. And
there is always something that will change everything that came before and whatever else
we are missing. But in that sense, we will never find it either, because we can always
find more knowledge that renders prior knowledge useless or wrong. Right. It's a cycle as a
(32:40):
library itself poses.
I think there is also some Buddhist philosophy thrown in there. I think on the second page
of the story, I think, I mean, at least that's how I read it. It says, what mystics claim
that their ecstasy is revealed to them, a circular chamber containing an enormous circular
book with a continuous spine that goes completely around the walls. I mean, if you go with the
(33:01):
interpretation that books are people, then all people are one and all the souls meet
up to the supreme soul or whatever. But this philosophy, it feels a little bit like that,
maybe. Or the other way, I think that's more expanded on later on in the story. When he
talks about the book that describes all the other books, like that contains all the knowledge
(33:23):
that's contained in all the other books. Is that like the search for the unified theory
that combines relativity and quantum mechanics or like whatever Einstein was looking for
before he died? I thought, yeah, those were two other things that stood out to me.
Yeah. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, but not Varsha, you make that point. It seems
to me Borges really did have some sort of tuning to the science going on with his time
(33:46):
and mathematics that probably, I don't think many other authors seem to have. I think in
general, my perception is that authors are very well, some are very good at their craft
or they know a lot about their craft, but they don't seem to struggle the science and
the arts, whereas Borges seemed to really do that really well. I suppose there are some
(34:10):
sort of science, I don't know what's the word I'm looking for in English, propagators, people
that write about science to spread this knowledge, but they're not really creators of literature
like Borges was. Yeah. This story just read to me, like all the theories of the universe
at the time rolled into like this one story. There was one thing that caught my attention
(34:34):
when reading it. I haven't got the story with him, but at some point he makes reference,
I think it's to someone from the future and he talks about kind of the ethnic mix and
he describes sort of the ethnicity of this person. And it's such a weird melting pot.
He talks about their ancestry has been kind of quite recorded, but like a real mix of
(34:59):
everything you could think of in humanity. And it's kind of like, it reminded me of that
South Park episode where they get visited from someone from the future. And again, the
people from the future, this sort of weird mix of all the different races on the earth
and the stuff. And I quite like that notion of mixing different peoples.
(35:20):
Which then leads me to the question of how, because at any point in the story, there are
couples presented. There is no mention that there is any way for families to exist because
every hexagon has a single librarian that is a lone librarian and it appears that they
are all mean. That's another question of how they keep coming up, the librarians. If you
(35:43):
take it in a very literal way, at the same time, there is no idea of how the library
continues to exist, how more people come in. So when I read that part, it was weird also
because of how can it be that this library exists that doesn't have frontiers as we have
(36:03):
in our current world, yet he's using those terms and that idea to present this person.
Good point. I don't have answers either, but I have more
questions. Apparently they all sleep upright. So uncomfortable.
And then there's one bit where he mentions that one book, he mentioned his father. So
(36:24):
that includes, that assumes families, but never mind that we don't hear anything about
women or children. Yes. But he mentions the father. So how would that work if there's
only one librarian? It gets complicated. Hermaphrodite librarians.
(36:45):
They are all Athena, they were just born from their brains.
I would be apt, would be apt going with the metaphors of knowledge.
I got a bit hung up here when he goes on, after he mentions the father, that there was
a book with the letters MCV, perversively repeated from the first to the last. And another
(37:08):
much consulted in this zone, he made a point, is a labyrinth of letters, but the ultimate
page contained the phrase, all time thy pyramids. So I've been playing around because MCV, I
was like, oh, maybe that's Roman numerals, but I can't for the life of me create a correlation
between the number or pyramids or time in any shape or form. And I spend some time trying
(37:31):
to figure that one out because it then goes and repeats again, MCV, MCV, that 400 pages
of and varying MCVs cannot belong to any language. Some have suggested that each letter influences
the next and that the value of MCV on page 71, line three is not the same value. Why?
(37:52):
Why? Can someone explain?
If you get all the possible combinations of the 25 elements in those books, in those many
shelves and with those many pages, you're going to get nonsense. It's like that thing
about if you had infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters and infinite time, just randomly
(38:12):
typing, eventually they will come up with Shakespeare's works, just by probability.
So I think sometimes you get nonsense. And we try to explain it and we don't get past
the fact that it's just nonsense.
Well, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherencies that relates
(38:35):
to your monkey statement, leagues of it.
I'm just now realizing, I was wondering why there are limited combinations of words, but
I'm just now realizing that the books are all the same size that laid out pretty early
on. I'd forgotten about that. I mean, how are you saying that only finite combinations?
But I did have a question that I was hoping to pick the brain of some of the mythology
(38:58):
experts in this group on why is the story called the library of Babel? What about Babel
does?
Well, it's a very famous library. I don't know much about it.
It's the Tower of Babel in the Bible, in the Old Testament. That's when humans only spoke
(39:19):
the same language and they tried to build a tower to reach God and God got pissed off
because the God of the Old Testament wasn't very nice. And then he confused them all and
he made them all speak in different languages so they wouldn't unite together and be stronger
than he was. And then they all set away and colonized the world.
Which leads to why we have some books that are gibberish and that nobody could understand
(39:43):
them.
I see. So like all the languages, it's the reference to the languages that were born
out of Babel. Yeah, that makes sense.
Yes. Good old Catholic upbringing.
No, it was like that. That was brilliant.
Yeah. All right. And here we are. I think sometimes you think that the story maybe he
didn't sit down and thought about all these things when writing it. He just felt like
(40:08):
I just want to put my interpretation or sort of try to explain the infinity of the universe
to the layman through a story. And then people have just gone crazy. Like with the NCB because
I was just like, it's going to be a Roman numeral. It's going to mean something. It's
so specific about it that it's got to mean something. And then we are one of those and
(40:29):
then we become the people he describes. Maybe there's the ultimate joke. We become the people
he describes trying to find meaning to gibberish in those books, isn't it?
So yeah, absolutely.
He even types out a gibberish word. You know, it's like DHC, MRL or whatever it is. And
yeah, you may be right, right there.
(40:52):
I started reading this and I even posted in a forum, replying to Levi and Varsha that
I was very confused because I spent the first 10 minutes just trying to draw, to make sense
of what the library looked like, because I know you're not making sense. And then I realized,
okay, I'm going to put this on hold because I need to continue with the story and we'll
(41:15):
get back to the visualization because it was making such a big point about it. So I thought
it was an important aspect of world building and I just wanted to figure it out. And then
I stumbled again with the MCVs and it's one of those, I guess I just fell into the trap.
I have a weird idea about the MCV. Why is there a book that hasn't been yet released?
(41:40):
So it's in the process of being written. It's in the library because the library contains
every book that has been and will be, but it has not yet been released, quote unquote,
in the sense of it has not yet written in the language that all the librarians speak.
Or it's the sequence. It will take a time because we have a lot of librarians at any
(42:01):
point in the story, it is written or explicitly told that the librarians write books. So how
do the books keep being added to the library? So in this case, the book will form itself.
Yeah. I did wonder about whether or not the library is unchanging because it feels like
I got the sense that it is unchanging, that it existed like this and it will continue
(42:25):
to exist like this to eternity. And I think that's the first axiom that it gives us to
write that the library has always existed and will continue to exist. But I don't know
if that says anything about the volumes in the library or if it's just the physical structure
of the library. But if it's including the volumes that there's nothing unchanging, they
do talk about inventing writing and stuff. Do the things that they write get added to
(42:48):
the library or is that just, I don't know, sent into the abyss to become dust in the
library? Like, yeah, I think that's an open question unless, I don't know, did anybody
read anything that tells us how the library changes and has things added to it? I felt
like it was supposed to be static, but I don't know what point that would make. Maybe we
(43:08):
interpreted it the way we want. I'm still hooked on the MCD and what you said made me
think something like perhaps this is a bit modern, too modern to take on it. But what
if we assume that every book within the library is written by somebody, some librarian somewhere
that is not explained in this case, the books are unique because they are that people's
(43:33):
perspective. What if MCV is actually produced, not manufactured? It could be the result.
If we have a, this is 2024, if we read it in this way, it could be an AI written book.
But back in that time, MCV could be, I don't know, a book from a big publisher or something
(43:54):
that is very structured, very repetitive, formulaic even compared to the other books
that are written for art. It could be that he was actually trying to make some commentary
on it. And I'm making that point because he had a magazine that was published within Argentina
and that was censored a few times as well because they were writing allegorical stuff
(44:18):
that had some political overview. Perhaps he was complaining about that, on this story.
V is just a very formulaic, not thoughtful, not thematic book that exists within this
library. Can you hear that? Is Borges laughing in the afterlife?
(44:40):
We are never going to know. I just like this letter the most. 40 years later, we found
out they were actually the initials of somebody. Why is the punctuation limited to just a comma
(45:07):
and a period? Because the semicolon is ugly. No one knows
how to use them properly. And M dash is on the table.
No, M dash is not that used in Spanish. So in Spanish, you generally use a semicolon
only. But you do have like quote marks, right?
But if the knowledge of a book is as it is and you are not quoting other books and you
(45:32):
don't use the quote marks. Exactly. Maybe that's what it means. It goes on saying that
the books are in many languages, but every language has different letters, different
punctuations. The alphabet has different numbers of letters. So there is some inconsistency
(45:54):
here because on one hand it was written from a very Spanish language perspective. And on
the other hand, trying to take in every other language. I think it was not quite successful.
It got confusing. So it depends. I mean, I get what he was trying to do, but at the same
time. And I think he understands as well because there's a bit when he is mentioning that a
(46:20):
book might be written in Portuguese. Others said that it was Yiddish. And my comment was,
yes, because they are so similar. But it still goes back to the fact that every language
has different number of letters in the alphabet, if nothing else, even if you don't go into
the punctuation. Do you think all the languages are transliterated to these 23 letters in
(46:41):
the library for some reason? They will lose meaning if they are transliterated. Some letters
don't exist in like in the, in Portuguese, the NH sound is made up with an N and an H.
In Spanish we have the N with a tilde up top. So some letters don't have a one for one within
(47:01):
Europe. They are like Chinese, which doesn't even have an alphabet. Every word is a different
character. So I think maybe both have a very Eurocentric view of things.
Oh, I was saying like I sometimes type Hindi to my in-laws with English. So like Hindi
(47:22):
words in English. So I was thinking it might be something like that. But yeah, if some
sounds are impossible to make, then yeah, that makes sense. Maybe that's not the right
way to think about it. What is Susana mentioned, and I think she's
right on this, that it's inconsistent because at one point he says that the books are in
every language, but then he gives these very limited alphabet. We could translate and we
(47:47):
also have the books that are gibberish. Perhaps the, the writers or the character that is
actually narrating all of these, it's just talking about ghost spell. He's not presenting
a law of this is how the book is, but instead is this is how I believe the books are, but
(48:07):
he presents it as a law because it's just ghost spell and what he believes in. Therefore
it is law for him, for the character. So it could be that it's just misleading because
it's not true. And it's just this idea that the character has that it has to be this way.
Going back to the idea of the hexagons as the people's knowledge, we are all restricted
(48:29):
and biased, but what we know and how we view the world, therefore it could be the limitation
of the librarian main character that we follow. To bring it all full circle and make a lot
more meta. Is this an indication that we have an unreliable narrator and therefore we just
discovered that his knowledge is obsolete because what he says doesn't make sense.
(48:51):
Yeah, I guess it comes back to that sentence of, yes, but are you certain you understand
my language? You read me. Or I guess to add meta-ness to your meta question, Jose, does
one inconsistency make the whole thing invalid? Or I guess in math, yes, but in language,
(49:15):
can we say there are parts of this that could be true and other parts that we need to look
deeper at?
No, if you're applying propositional logic, which is meant to work in every aspect, no
matter what. So as soon as you get a contradiction, you know, propositional logic is there. So
you are meant to be able to talk about anything without knowing what you're talking about
without having a knowledge just following logic rules. You're able to make conclusions
(49:38):
or inferences. If there is a breakdown there, everything is invalid.
Fair enough. So if this is supposed to be a text that's placing the laws of physics,
then yeah, everything is wrong. But if it's one person's interpretation of the world,
then maybe there are some truths and other parts are not.
No, sorry, I was going to say, but that goes against, I don't know, again, this could be
(50:01):
my interpretation, but I think particularly in science, truth is objective. There's nothing,
there's no expression I hate more these days than when people talk about my truth or their
truth or your truth is like, no, there is, you know, the truth is objective. And I think,
you know, we should all and we could all agree on that. Obviously, you can have subjective
(50:23):
tastes and interpretations, but I think in the realms of science, there is no argument.
I think there is objectivity there.
Oh, that's true. Definitely. But what I'm wondering if is there's a difference between
incomplete knowledge and false knowledge, right? So could be that the narrator has incomplete
knowledge because of which he's making mistakes and giving us inconsistencies as he goes along
(50:45):
versus it's not an interpretation. It's just, yeah, he doesn't know enough. So he's confusing
himself and us.
Oh, yeah. Or he's making wrong conclusions because of incomplete knowledge. Yeah, that's
a good point.
Yeah, there's this couple of things in here. Like in the second page, he says the orthographical
symbols are 25 in number. Then later on, he says there's 20 orthographical symbols. And
(51:10):
a couple pages later, possible combinations of 20 odd, 20 odd. Okay, so maybe that can
be 25. But then somebody earlier mentioned 23. And so there's a bunch of jumping around
about how all this stuff is. Yeah, there's 22 letters of an alphabet. So there's a whole
bunch of jumping around about the number of actual symbols in an alphabet or letters.
(51:36):
But maybe he's precisely or purposely making that point that we discussed earlier about
our inability and our impossibility to understand everything.
Right. Yeah.
And then Rater is showing his inability to explain and understand everything.
Yeah, that makes sense.
If you read the last line, let me make the parallelism here. He says, if an eternal traveler
(52:02):
should journey in any direction, he will find an untold centuries at the same volumes are
repeated in the same disorder, which repeated becomes order, the order in cups. So he says
that whatever a state eventually becomes the truth, that's why he uses the capital. So
to extrapolate that to our discussion, the number of letters, it doesn't matter. It's
(52:25):
the number of letters. Therefore, it's correct.
It exists. So it's correct. So the library is the source of truth, I suppose.
But just cannot be incorrect. Something like that.
I'm just going to share what I think is the one of the bleakest things I've read. I underlined
it because I think it was the sentence that hit me the most. The certainty that everything
(52:50):
has already been written, annulses or renders us phantasm. I know districts in which the
young people prostrate themselves before books and like savages, kiss their pages, though
they cannot read the letter. This is so it brings so true, especially these days. I don't
know. It just already is. And that's when the story got to me. I stopped caring about
(53:14):
trying to make sense of things. And this is pretty much what I take from it and how futile
it is to actually know it all. We keep searching. We keep going through those accidents, trying
to make sense of things.
That is true. I'm going to take what you said. I want to give you all a very modern take
on this short story, which is this was an amazing, long and thorough discussion for
(53:40):
a short story that is only eight pages long. As a bit of trivia, there is a Reddit top
bottom that tried to enact the library of Babel. And you can go in there and try to
search for some of the books like the MCV book that we mentioned. I will leave the link
in the description. Go read the story. It's very interesting. But before we go, let's
(54:01):
do a round of photos with my guests. All the links will be in the description box.
Well, thank you. You can find my YouTube channel where I discuss mostly fantasy books and comics
at Jose's Amazing Worlds. And I also hold author interviews and discussions.
Thank you so much for having me, Livia. I'm sorry, the dog. She's thanking you as well.
(54:24):
You can find me on X as Kronodendron and you can find my books pretty much everywhere.
Period is timelessness. First book is Weird God. And check out my channel, then Weird.
First, thank you so much for having me, Livia. This was a blast. And you can find me on YouTube
at the Fantasy Thinker channel and you can find me on various discussions on page chewing.com
(54:47):
as well. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I
really enjoyed this discussion. You can find me on my YouTube channel, Reading by the Rainy
Mountain. The About Page has links to some SFF discussion and podcasts, including speculative
speculations where we talk about sci fi books. Go check that out if that's of interest to
you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. So if you enjoyed this
(55:08):
episode, please like, subscribe and feel free to comment with your thoughts. I always try
to answer. Also consider subscribing to my newsletter, which will get you into exclusive
discussions, read-alongs and heads up of the episodes, especially of the author's spotlights.
The link will be in the description. That said, thanks for listening and happy reading.
Popular Podcasts
1. The Podium
The Podium: An NBC Olympic and Paralympic podcast. Join us for insider coverage during the intense competition at the 2024 Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games. In the run-up to the Opening Ceremony, we’ll bring you deep into the stories and events that have you know and those you'll be hard-pressed to forget.
2. In The Village
In The Village will take you into the most exclusive areas of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games to explore the daily life of athletes, complete with all the funny, mundane and unexpected things you learn off the field of play. Join Elizabeth Beisel as she sits down with Olympians each day in Paris.
3. iHeartOlympics: The Latest
Listen to the latest news from the 2024 Olympics.