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Borges: The Library of Babel [pdf]
- throwaway889900 5y agoAnd if you liked this one, there's also the Book of Sand. Similar theme of infinite, generally useless, and unattainable knowledge.
- JoeDaDude 5y agoIt's been said that the maze-like library in "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco was inspired by the Library of Babel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose#:~:text=The%20mystery%20revolves%20around%20the,is%20occupied%20by%20the%20library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose#:~:text=T....
- perihelions 5y agoWhat's this syntax from? Is there a browser that implements it as a content-relative anchor? It looks convenient. #:~:text=
- gus_massa 5y agoIt's call "Text Fragments", and it was introduced to Chrome more than one year ago. https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment I think it works in Chrome and Edge, but not in Firefox.
- perihelions 5y agoThanks! Indeed, it seems to be just those for now: https://caniuse.com/url-scroll-to-text-fragment https://caniuse.com/url-scroll-to-text-fragment
- hangtwenty 5y agoIn a Chrome browser on desktop, you can right click and "Copy Link to Highlighted Text". That's the context (hah, pun) where I know it from. It's really useful!
- lapetitejort 5y agoThe character Jorge of Burgos is also named after Borges.
- benrockwood 5y agoBorges is the best author most people have never heard of. His stories are mind bending and he's an amazing human being. You can listen to him giving lectures on verse here, his voice is hypnotic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSLV7t9DvN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSLV7t9DvN8
- emmelaich 5y agowas .. he died in 1986. I love Borges. Part of the reason he's less well known is that his widow has kept a tight grip on his estate. Even denying his co-translator publishing rights. And Borges used to give him 50pc of the sales!
- frozenport 5y agoGoogle runs his portrait, if he was niche before this is certainly not the case now. https://www.google.com/doodles/112th-birthday-of-jorge-luis-borges https://www.google.com/doodles/112th-birthday-of-jorge-luis-...
- aaroninsf 5y agoMost people is an interesting marker. In my academic circles he was a demigod, alongside other giants of South American and SA diaspora literature like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Isabella Allende, and was considered more or less on par with Franz Kafka in terms of significance. Familiarity with all his major work was taken for granted. I participated in a thread recently about the relative merits of attending college. I opined in it that contrary to the OP's presumption, jumping immediately into bootcamp or into a startup etc., there are things to be had from a broad liberal arts education that you're unlikely to pick up elsewhere in any comprehensive away. The broader intellectual landscape of your culture is one; less important than intimate familiarity with any particular writer or canon is a sense that such things exist; and are always evolving in response to cultural currents. Borges is so important a figure it is striking that he would be considered esoteric. I imagine the same is true now for other giants of world literature, like Milan Kundera, or, Stanislaw Lem, or, Italo Calvino, all of whom still have a lot to offer a contemporary audience.
- viebel 5y agoI really like this story. The idea that everything is written inside one of the books of this library is mind blowing!
- macando 5y agoIn Borges' story, the Aleph is a point in space that contains all other points. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping, or confusion. The story traces the theme of infinity found in several of Borges' other works, such as "The Book of Sand". Maze is another favorite theme of his. Borges fractalizes the labyrinth, infinitely multiplies the interconnections between spaces — but makes all these spaces identical, cloned pieces of an infinite non-linear repetition, extending vertiginously into eternity, out in space and deep into the future, forever onwards.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoMore perplexing to me is the notion that such a library contains no information, owing to this description: > each book is unique and irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles - books that differ by no more than a single letter, or comma If one were to try and distinguish one book of Shakespeare from another, they would need the full text they are looking for in order to be sure they have an accurate copy. essentially your key length is equal to the content length, and if you have the key already, the library contains nothing further. I consider this as presaging the info-spam of an infinite, bot-infested internet: as more near misses of actual content is produced, the internet can contain measurably less information.
- sergius 5y agoMy favorite is "The Immortal": https://matiane.wordpress.com/2019/10/11/immortal-by-jorge-luis-borges/ https://matiane.wordpress.com/2019/10/11/immortal-by-jorge-l...
- macando 5y agoI emerged into a kind of small plaza — a courtyard might better describe it. It was surrounded by a single building, of irregular angles and varying heights. It was to this heterogeneous building that the many cupolas and columns belonged. More than any other feature of that incredible monument, I was arrested by the great antiquity of its construction. I felt that it had existed before humankind, before the world itself. Its patent antiquity (though somehow terrible to the eyes) seemed to accord with the labor of immortal artificers. Great story. Aleph is amazing as well.
- fmlp 5y agoEmergí a una suerte de plazoleta; mejor dicho, de patio. Lo rodeaba un solo edificio de forma irregular y altura variable; a ese edificio heterogéneo pertenecían las diversas cúpulas y columnas. Antes que ningún otro rasgo de ese monumento increíble, me suspendió lo antiquísimo de su fábrica. Sentí que era anterior a los hombres, anterior a la tierra. Esa notoria antigüedad (aunque terrible de algún modo para los ojos) me pareció adecuada al trabajo de obreros inmortales. Unfortunatelly, that translation failed to capture at least two keywords in the original: "patio" (courtyard) and "obreros" (artificers). Both terms have many overtones in the borgean vocabulary, both have heavy loaded connotations in his literature and in the Buenos Aires language. "Humankind" for "hombres" is strange as well: I don't think "humanidad" was a borgean term; I do not know if there's a better way to translate "los hombres" though.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- CyanBird 5y ago"Before people" for English carries the same weight, but yeah humankind is too formal of a term I do disagree about the artíficers bit, I feel that even when it is not a transliteration, it does carry the feel of manual manufacture
- pilaf 5y agoSomeone implemented the Library of Babel into a website, it even has a search feature to find a page with any (valid) content you can give it: https://libraryofbabel.info/ https://libraryofbabel.info/
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kongin 5y agoI rather enjoyed the short essay: https://web.archive.org/web/19970614230544/jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/universal_library.html https://web.archive.org/web/19970614230544/jubal.westnet.com... In my Lovecraftian phase I imagined an infinite winding black pagoda with brail inscriptions on its walls. If you're very lucky you would wander up or down until you died of thirst reading nothing but nonsense. If you weren't you'd find the necronomicon or worse. Unlike the library the text would not be finite and there would be no limit to the eldritch horrors you could find within.
- Loughla 5y agoI think there's real possibility for a good creeping horror story in that premise.
- zuminator 5y agoNice find. That was written by Willard van Orman Quine, the noted logician/philosopher whose surname was adopted to refer to computer programs that are designed to output their own source code. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)
- JoeDaDude 5y agoI suspect this is obvious to the HN audience, but this work is nice little exposition on some concepts of Information Theory. I wonder if Claude Shannon had any thoughts on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory https://utopiaordystopia.com/tag/claude-shannon-a-mathematical-theory-of-communication/ https://utopiaordystopia.com/tag/claude-shannon-a-mathematic...
- jedimastert 5y agoI've always enjoyed the idea of the library of babel. Shameless self-promotion: https://aarontag.dev/2020/12/06/youtube-library-babel-section-230.html https://aarontag.dev/2020/12/06/youtube-library-babel-sectio...
- lapetitejort 5y agoAny Fermi Problem-like answers to how large the library would be, based on how the number of permutations of the books and the size of each room? Is it an easy guess to say larger than the size of the universe?
- lapetitejort 5y agoAccording to the story, each book has: * 410 pages * 40 lines per page * 80 characters per line * Not included: The characters on the front cover, maybe 15 on average? There are 25 symbols. So there are 25^(410*40*80) possible books, which comes out to ~10^1834097 books. Sufficed to say, the library could hold numerous universes.
- Izikiel43 5y agoThat's most likely an upper limit, as random character strings are not necessarily language.
- mcguire 5y agoOn the contrary, a random character string is meaningful in some conceivable language.
- scarmig 5y agoAll you need is a reference to the book that describes the grammar of that language.
- libraryofbabel 5y agoIf you read the story you will see that most books present the appearance of random strings of characters.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoIf the sets of integers and reals is anything to go by, an infinitesimal portion of the books would include something that's actually legible, but perhaps the books could be sorted so those containing the most sensible arrangements of letters were kept nearby: don't bother looking at those noisy tomes of high entropy.
- optimalsolver 5y agoThis is the best audio presentation of The LIbrary Of Babel that I've ever found: https://www.mboxdrive.com/Library_Of_Babel.mp3 https://www.mboxdrive.com/Library_Of_Babel.mp3 (Originally from the "Let's Read!" YouTube channel, but since deleted: https://www.youtube.com/c/LetsReadOfficial https://www.youtube.com/c/LetsReadOfficial)
- GabrieleR 5y agomost French version that can be found sounds quite bad
- tasty_freeze 5y ago35+ years ago when AT&T had lost the monopoly on phones and the market was flooded with various phones and each was trying to distinguish themselves, a common bragging point was how many quick dial numbers it could hold. I used to joke that I was going to introduce a phone that could remember 10M 7-digit numbers: just enter the 7-digit index of the phone number you want to recall.
- te_taniwha 5y agoBorges loved to explore the idea of infinity. Another story of his, The Garden of Forking Paths, explores the idea of a multiverse. One other interesting tidbit that always intrigued me about Borges is that he became completely blind while he was the director of the Argentine National Library. In a strange irony, it became his own "Library of Babel", in the sense that he had so much knowledge within reach, but limited capacity to interpret it.
- dpflan 5y agoMany great stories to chose from: I found the Lottery of Babylon to be a great story on randomness in life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery_in_Babylon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery_in_Babylon
- GabrieleR 5y agosuch an odissey! huge fan here
- willsoon 5y agoLike many other Borges' stories they reach a point where it is no other thing but a different way to tell about the world. The Lottery finds that deliver money it's not enough, it will deliver joy, pain, enlightenment, suffering, tragedy and hapiness too. So one bought a ticket not just to gain some gold, but to play.
- jl6 5y agoThe Lottery in Babylon is the same essential idea as the Library of Babel. The Lottery becomes so sophisticated, it becomes indistinguishable from the “random” events of reality, and therefore is there really any lottery at all?
- KingFelix 5y agoHe spoke on these topics a lot, similar to how Philip K Dick asks whats real anyway, using memories etc. Borges has another story about a map that becomes indistinguishable to reality. On Exactitude in Science (I believe its this one)
- BLKNSLVR 5y agoThe map that exactly covers the territory it is mapping. I love what that little snippet of story does to my understanding of the 'world in general' (my personal mental map). ... In that empire, the art of Cartography reached such perfection that the map of a single province occupied the whole of a city, and the map of th empire took up an entire province. With time, those exaggerated maps no longer satisfied, and the Colleges of Cartographers came up with a map of the empire that had the size of the empire itself, and coincided with it point by point. Less addicted to the study of Cartography, succeeding generations understood that this extended map was useless, and without compassion, they abandoned it to the inclemencies of the sun and of the winters. In the deserts of the west, there remain tattered fragments of the map, inhabited by animals and beggars; in the whole country there are no other relics of the geographical disciplines. The universe could well be a simulation ... of its exact self.
- 101008 5y agoAs a HN reader from Argentina, I thank ColinWright to share this with the community. Here in Argentina we are very proud of Borges and his works - and it is always nice to see people from around the world discovering or revisiting him.
- 50 5y agoHere are several of my favorite excerpts by him/related to him to which you might enjoy if you haven't already came across them: "You were asleep. I wake you. The vast morning brings the illusion of a beginning. You had forgotten Virgil. Here are the hexameters. I bring you many things. The four Greek elements: earth, water, fire, air. The single name of a woman. The friendship of the moon. The bright colors of the atlas. Forgetting, which purifies. Memory, which chooses and rediscovers. The habits which help us to feel we are immortal. The sphere and the hands that measure elusive time. The fragrance of sandalwood. The doubts that we call, not without some vanity, metaphysics. The curve of the walking stick the hand anticipates. The taste of grapes and of honey." "Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone." "All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare." "If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author." "Jorge Luis Borges fantasizes about Shakespeare speaking to God: I who have been so many men in vain want to be one, to be myself. God answered him out of a whirlwind: I too am not I; I dreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your own work, and among the forms of my own dream are you, who like me are many, yet no one." "You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened." "This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries –embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and yet in others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words but am in error, a phantom Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures." "The Visuddhimagga (Road to Purity), illustrates the same doctrine with the same figure: Strictly speaking, the duration of the life of a living being is exceedingly brief, lasting only while a thought lasts. Just as a chariot wheel in rolling rolls only at one point of the tire, and in resting rests only at one point; in exactly the same way the life of a living being lasts only for the period of one thought (Radhakrishnan: Indian Philosophy, I, 373). Other Buddhist texts say that the world annihilates itself and reappears six thousand five hundred million times a day and that all men are an illusion, vertiginously produced by a series of momentaneous and solitary men. The being of a past moment of thought — the Road to Purity tells us — has lived, but does not live nor will it live. The being of a future moment will live, but has not lived nor does it live. The being of the present moment of thought does live, but has not lived nor will it live (op. cit., I, 407), a dictum which we may compare with the following of Plutarch (De E apud Delphos, 18): The man of yesterday has died in that of today, that of today dies in that of tomorrow."
- chaoticmass 5y agoThere is a fun story based off this idea, A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck [0]. In the story the character dies and wakes up in a kind of hell that is basically a version of the library of Babel. There are other people there. You're allowed to leave if you can find the book that has your life story in it. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Short-Stay-Hell-Steven-Peck/dp/098374842X https://www.amazon.com/Short-Stay-Hell-Steven-Peck/dp/098374...
- jimothyhalpert7 5y agoYou could also just find a book that tells you another way of getting out, no?
- jl6 5y agoHow would you tell the difference between that book and a similar book with a plausible but flawed escape plan? To paraphrase The Incredibles: when every book is there, no book is there.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- a1369209993 5y agoHow would you tell the difference between a book that has your life story in it and a similar book with inaccuracies in all the details you don't remember?
- rinnan 5y agoThis naturally evolved on my mind to, "Whose (or what) life are you thinking of when you think of your own?"
- omegaham 5y agoThe book qualifies this by giving everyone a perfect memory of every moment of their lives. > I found I could recall every detail of my life; every event ever experienced I could remember with perfect clarity. I could remember every word on every page I'd ever read. Every conversation. Every tax form I'd ever filled out. I could reconstruct every second of every day I'd been alive from the moment of my birth until the day I finally shut my eyes at the end. > This clarity of memory surprised me the first time I tried reviewing the past, but it was all there. (This was to be the greatest curse of Hell. Sometimes I would reply my entire life again and again for thousands of years. Remembering all the things I could have done differently, all the things... No. I won't go there now. I must tell this story).
- libraryofbabel 5y agoWilliam Goldbloom Bloch, The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel is a pretty good companion volume by a math professor, delving into some fun combinations and topology topics.
- grozmovoi 5y agoah that looks great! Does it go into a possible implementation of it? I have been toying with the idea of making one but I lack the training and I'd love some guidance.
- staplung 5y agoIt's fun to think about all the things that are in the library. E.g. your exact genome, or the genome of a T. Rex. A hi-def version of every movie ever made, encoded in a suitable format that respects the limitations of the allowed "alphabet" (most of those would look like noise to a reader). A hi-def version of every movie that could be made. All music. This post. The entire internet. A description of every event that has ever occurred. The meaning of life, the universe and everything. If gets even more fun when you try to think about transcriptions of infinitely long things, like the digits of pi. They wouldn't find in one volume of course but so what? The number of possible volumes in the library is finite but the digits of pi are not.
- p_j_w 5y agoOne of my favorite podcasts, Very Bad Wizards, had an episode where they discussed this story. Highly recommend. https://www.verybadwizards.com/144 https://www.verybadwizards.com/144
- bsanr2 5y agoVideo (game) essayist Jacob Geller did a few videos which mentioned this work. https://youtu.be/MjY8Fp-SCVk https://youtu.be/MjY8Fp-SCVk https://youtu.be/Zm5Ogh_c0Ig https://youtu.be/Zm5Ogh_c0Ig They're quite interesting, I think. The abyss really gets him going. And a few more I really like: https://youtu.be/oca8BnDMin4 https://youtu.be/oca8BnDMin4 https://youtu.be/mexs39y0Imw https://youtu.be/mexs39y0Imw https://youtu.be/aBBuoD9eL5k https://youtu.be/aBBuoD9eL5k https://youtu.be/Zkv6rVcKKg8 https://youtu.be/Zkv6rVcKKg8
- rezmason 5y agoSomeone has done a beautiful audioviz treatment of this story. https://vimeo.com/508141139 https://vimeo.com/508141139 https://jamesvde.com/babel https://jamesvde.com/babel
- gyre007 5y agoThis my most favourite story by miles
- prvc 5y agoI like Borges, but this is one of his weakest stories. The mathematical point made is on the trivial side (and most readers who praise it interpret it as merely making a mathematical point). It is a bit stronger if read as an implicit critique of logocentrism or religious textualism, but still falls short of the best few of his other fictional works.
- narcraft 5y agoWhat are some of his best works?
- lalaland1125 5y agoThis story isn't really about mathematics. It's about the human response. It's about how we humans are pattern seeking creatures in a world of chaos that create patterns through our own process of seeking.
- narcraft 5y agoCan someone please help me? I'm trying to recall a post on HN within the past year that ended up introducing me to The Library of Babel. It was like a textual/visual blog post/article either in the same vein as The Library or direct text from it...or maybe the images were originally meant to illustrate it. It was weird. That's all I can remember.
- damontal 5y agoI posted this to HN 10 months ago but it got no attention. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/04/virtual-library-of-babel-makes-borgess-infinite-store-of-books-a-reality-almost https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/04/virtual-librar...
- ColinWright 5y agoHave you tried a search? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=library%20of%20babel&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Does that show up what you're looking for?
- narcraft 5y agoThank you, but no luck. I don't think the post had any explicit references. Could've sworn someone must've mentioned it in the comments because how else would I end up on the Library of Babel wikipedia page?
- fmajid 5y agoI liked the story enough I commissioned a custom bookplate for myself based on it, by Daniel Mitsui: http://www.danielmitsui.com/00_pictures/majid.jpg http://www.danielmitsui.com/00_pictures/majid.jpg (It’s the scene where biblioclasts throw books and even people down the staircases).
- every 5y agoHis Book of Imaginary Beings is a favorite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Imaginary_Beings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Imaginary_Beings
- ffhhj 5y ago> the middle-square method is a method of generating pseudorandom numbers > The book The Broken Dice by Ivar Ekeland gives an extended account of how the method was invented by a Franciscan friar known only as Brother Edvin sometime between 1240 and 1250.[3] Supposedly, the manuscript is now lost, but Jorge Luis Borges sent Ekeland a copy that he made at the Vatican Library. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-square_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-square_method
- sexcombat 5y ago"The Library is unlimited but periodic" Or, the library is limited but lives on closed and circular universe.