Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Insomniac at the library of babel

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It's about three in the morning and I really need to go to sleep so I can get to class/work a few hours from now on. Yet I keep on getting new ideas I have to jot down before falling asleep for the fear of losing them. It really does feel like my whole life in the memory is a house of cards that will collapse at the slightest touch.
 
I keep on thinking about that short story written by Jorges Luis Borges (one of the greatest writers who ever lived), the Library of Babel. Aside from the obvious metaphysical food for thought present in the story, I've been having a lot of fun building a little physical simulation of the library in my notebook. Or should I say mathematical simulation?
 
I love mathematics. I love how it brings the structure of the universe and ideas so thrillingly close to the everyday mind, and I love certain taste of aesthetic purity present in good mathematical forms like it is with sublime music. Most of all, I love how it is so rich to the extent that I can confidently say that humanity as a species still do not have a very goods understanding of what mathematics is and its place in the physical universe. I also love libraries. In fact I love books and libraries so much that I'm a regular visitor of the Morgan library museum and I spend much of free time going bookstore hopping with my friends. I even have a special section in my flickr account devoted to things related to books and libraries. As such, the library of babel with its exuberant mathematical structure (almost like verbal music) and its subject matter of an entire universe of books just appeals to the deepest core of my soul.
 
The library of babel, according to my rough calculation, is orders of magnitudes larger than the estimated size of our current universe. Borges set a certain superficial size of books each containing random combination of 23 alphabets (their language isn't English). The library is the place containing books formed of all possible combinations of the 23 alphabets within the given length individual books, each of the books arranged randomly on a uniform shelves that is calculated to span a few billionbillionbillion years at the speed of light, meaning people die within those libraries without ever getting out. In fact, the method of disposal of the dead within the library is to throw the dead over the railings (there are multiple levels within the library), and the body will rot and decompose into nothingness without ever hitting the floor (I would hate to be on the floor of the rough location of the total decomposition. The place should be covered thick with dusts that were once human). There are religious sects and scientific communities within the library, some of them making pilgrimages of the more coherent sites (and sometimes turn to banditry), and discussing the nature and structure of the library without being able to see the whole. Apparently there are librarians of the library as well, though they always despair on the futility of their exercise, for it would be impossible for any single human mind to be able to learn the secret organization of the library (if there are any) due to its vast size and complexity. We are talking about a library within which the distance from one bookshelf to some other bookshelf would take billions and more light years.
 
The setting is of such mind boggling complexity and imagination, as well as that peculiar brand of dusty yet elegant aesthetics present in Borges' other works, I'm actually writing a small fanfic/diary based on the library of babel universe. It hasn't been too long since I started but I plan on keep writing, based both on my own experiences and my imagination.
 
Sometimes it pains me that while I have the power to imagine such worlds, I do not have the power to make them come true. At least not within my life time.

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