Viewpoints
[Eli Park Sorensen] The gigantic, confusing library of the universe
Dec. 23, 2012
In the story “The Library of Babel” (1941), the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges imagines the universe as a gigantic library, consisting of an indefinite number of hexagonal rooms, each filled with rows of books. “Each book,” writes Borges, “is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are in black color.” Most of the text inside the books, however, consists of sequences of letters utterly incomprehensible and unreadable to the people inh