User:Astrid van Nimwegen - Annotation: The library of Babel

Annotation ‘The library of Babel’ (from the book ‘Aleph’ – Dutch translation from 1998 by Barber van der Pol)

‘The library of Babel’ (1941) is a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). The story is about the total universe imagined as an infinite library, which consists an endless number of hexagonal rooms that contains all possible books in the universe. Every wall has five shelves containing 32 books of the same size with 410 pages, 80 characters on each line made out of 25 symbols. People search their whole lifetime for that ‘one book’ in which the comprehensive truth about life is written and the mystery of humanity is answered. Without any order of these books it seems an endless and depressive task to seek for answers; people become desperate while they roam through the library. There were men who destroy all useless books, other men who try to order the symbols in the right way to imitate the divine disorder. The narrator prays that, if he himself is not able to find the perfect summary that should exist somewhere in the universe and covers everything, there hopefully might be one man who did read the truth. "The library is limitless and periodic. If an eternal traveler cross her in any direction, he would, after centuries, see that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder (which, repeated, would constitute an order: Order!). In my solitude I am happy with this elegant hope. " (free translation with help from translate.google.nl)