Patten: A library with every page ever written — and those that never were
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What if you could access a library that not only had every page that has ever been written in English, but every page that could be written?
Did you dislike how “Harry Potter” ended? Check out the library’s other versions. If you prefer your stories dark, you are welcome to read the countless volumes where Voldemort wins!
Alexandria’s library is gone, but its knowledge is on this library’s shelves.
How about some nonfiction — the story of your life, perhaps? The library has it, even the parts you haven’t lived yet. Books that disappeared from history? Alexandria’s library is gone, but its knowledge is on this library’s shelves. The secret to immortality? The purpose of the universe? All there.
This library is a creation of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in his short story “The Library of Babel.”
It is so vast, Borges says the library is synonymous with the universe.
But it isn’t stacks of books strewn everywhere. It is laid out in a seemingly infinite number of hexagonal rooms. Four walls hold five shelves each, with two of the sides being exits. Each shelf contains 32 books of 410 pages.
At first glance, it seems like paradise:
“When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope.”
Explore the Library of Babel yourself
This library is not a dream. Not anymore. It exists.
In fact, you can access it for free online. Here’s the link.
But BEFORE you click, think about the ramifications of having access to every possible page. Every. Possible. Page.
What do all possible pages of lowercase letters, commas, periods and spaces look like? Here’s the first page of the first volume of the first shelf of the first wall in Hexagon 0 in the online version of the library:
(From the book titled “tig .xsw“.)
How it works
Each page in the online library contains 3,200 characters. The library contains 29^3200 pages. This “would have required longer than the lifespan of our planet to create and more disk space than would fit in the knowable universe to store,” according to the library itself.
To get around this, the library is generated by algorithm. It’s not simple randomness, though — you can go to a hexagon (room), wall and shelf and find the same book with the same contents every time. Technical details on how that works here.
It’s important to note that as of now the online library contains all possible pages, not all possible books (combinations of pages) as in Borges’ story.
Other Babel-ish projects
Finding novels in the Library of Babel. One enthusiast of the library has created links to pages matching to “Don Quixote” and “War and Peace.”
Library of Babel in 3D or virtual reality (Android only).
Babel Image Archives. The sister project to the online Library of Babel, but with pixels instead of letters. It contains “portraits of every person who ever lived at every moment in their life, digitized versions of every work of art ever created, even those lost to history, as well as every work of art which ever could be created, and photographs of your own birth, wedding, and funeral.” As with the text library, what you get is mostly noise (though dead you is smiling somewhere inside the image library).
Library of Words. Like the Library of Babel, but with combinations of words, not characters. It only (only!) has 10^1776 pages.
Can you find anything?
The Library of Babel does contain legible masterpieces. More than you can imagine. But if you spend your whole life browsing the shelves, you likely won’t find Shakespeare’s lost plays, let alone the directions on your shampoo bottle.
Online readers of the library have an advantage that Borges’ characters did not — you can search for words or phrases and filter your search results for pages with English words.
And if you’re browsing at random, you can have English words highlighted among the gobbledygook. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll find something …
Is the library hell?
… But you probably won’t. Not without knowing what you’re looking for. It won’t take long for you to feel like the inhabitants of Borges’ library:
“As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression. The certitude that some shelf in some hexagon held precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible, seemed almost intolerable.”
I asked the creator of the online library, Jonathan Basile, if he thought the library was heaven or hell.
His answer? It depends. Basile, who is just starting a Ph.D. program in comparative literature, steered me to the last stanza of Borges’ poem “Of Heaven and Hell“:
In the clear glass of a dream, I have glimpsed
the Heaven and Hell that lie in wait for us:
when Judgement Day sounds in the last trumpets
and planet and millennium both
disintegrate, and all at once, O Time,
all your ephemeral pyramids cease to be,
the colors and the lines that trace the past
will in the semi-darkness form a face,
a sleeping face, faithful, still, unchangeable
(the face of the loved one, or, perhaps, your own)
and the sheer contemplation of that face —
never-changing, whole, beyond corruption —
will be, for the rejected, an Inferno,
and, for the elected, Paradise.
In the poem, all people arrive at the same afterlife, but they experience it differently.
“Perhaps the Library of Babel is something like this,” Basile said.
If you are looking for rationality and intent, you’re going to find the library extremely unpleasant.
However, Basile said, “if you develop a more playful attitude toward the books and toward yourself, if you are willing to let them play with or without a secure meaning, to accept what they do or don’t tell you with a meditative indifference, I believe it could begin to resemble at least nirvana, if not heaven.”
Maybe what the library is depends on who you are, what you’re looking at and what you’re looking for.
And it all means … what?
In some ways, the library isn’t unique.
“The Library of Babel is a place for scholars to do research, for artists and writers to seek inspiration, for anyone with curiosity or a sense of humor to reflect on the weirdness of existence — in short, it’s just like any other library,” its About page states.
On the other hand, it is like nothing else ever. I don’t know of anything so full of mind-numbing possibilities and frustrations as the Library of Babel. After awhile, I stopped trying to read the meaning of individual pages or books, and instead, out of awe or hubris, tried to comprehend the entire thing.
My thoughts went from confusion to confusion.
The library, like the universe, has islands of beauty and purpose, but in both realms, nearly everything has little meaning. Still … everything has a purpose, even if it’s to be devoid of purpose, right? Is the meaning of the library — and the universe — not to have meaning at all?
I don’t know. But that doesn’t mean we should stop browsing the shelves for meaning. Maybe someday we’ll come upon the right book and turn to the right page.
Maybe.