Borges: Where Libraries Meet Schopenhauer

The Library of Babel is a short story about a fictional library written by Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. It is set in an infinite library composed of hexagonal room and contacting nothing but books full of randomly combined letters. In the library, cults have formed that seek to destroy certain books, there are ideas that certain book contain secret meanings, and other sorts of strange, semi-religious speculation about the library and the works within it. From the novel: “ Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born” (Borges, p.112) . The story has a pessimistic, nihilistic edge to it.

The story, much like many of Borges’s works, is very much influenced by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, a man famous for his atheism, nihilism, defense of animals, and defense of pedophiles. An interesting philosopher, but why would an author apply his nihilism to libraries?

To repeat, the story is fictional, but, when one stops to think about it, there are shades of reality to it. With the quality of the web being what it is, is it really that much worse than a collection of randomly ordered letters? Is throwing a book off one of the infinite ledges of the library cause destroy information like a black hole may or may not destroy information.

What does it take to be the “catalogue of catalogues”?

Works cited:

Borges, Jorge Luis (1998) Collected fictions. New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Viking.