Reviews
Was a good read.
I read this as part of my course on Aesthetics when we were exploring the relationship between literature and philosophy, and the capacity for fiction to convey philosophical concepts. The seven pages of this short story are about "the Universe (which others call the Library)". The Library is a collection of galleries, infinite in size, which contains an indefinite but not quite infinite number of books whose contents are all derived from varying arrangements of the same 25 symbols. It's essentially a more poetic version of the theory that an infinite amount of monkeys with typewriters will eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. "One book, which my father once saw in a hexagon in circuit 15-94, consisted of the letters M C V perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (much consulted in this zone) is a mere labyrinth of letters whose penultimate page contains the phrase 'O Time thy pyramids'." All in all, a whimsically specific and metaphysically entertaining piece of philosophy. "In the vast Library there are no two identical books...its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books."
Really interesting and thought provoking short stories. I really enjoyed reading this.
Highlights
“The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of man. The certitude that everything has been written negates us, it turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter.”
“Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god.”