Imaginary Libraries
Contemplating infinity on a long weekend...
In 1941, inspired by an entry in a South American literary journal called Sur, Jorge Luis Borges imagined a nearly infinite library comprised of hexagonal rooms with shelves of 410-page long books comprised of 22 alphabetic and grammatical characters. Within this library, you’ll find every book that could result from an ordering of those glyphs. Most will be gibberish, some perfect art and one might be an ur-text that explains and catalogues all others.
In his introduction to the collection Ficciones, where you will find the story “The Library of Babel,” Borges contemplates the indulgence of writing books – trying to perfect one idea in 500 pages when that idea might be more easily and elegantly expressed in a brief conversation with the author. For the sake of efficiency and economy, Borges has chosen to write short pieces, mostly about other books, including other books that don’t exist. Borges created the pieces Ficciones as if he were a caretaker of his own nearly infinite library, which is a pretty nifty way of looking at having a reflexively self-conscious mind, as humans do.
Middlebrow recalls that Neil Gaiman’s King of Dreams in Sandman had a library that contained the written and unwritten works of all dreamers, including titles like “The Best-selling Suspense Novel That Will Sell Millions of Copies So That I Never Have to Work Again.” The idea of unbounded libraries that contain not only what has been created but what has been postulated amounts to a cosmology and a stand-in for the idea of an infinite or near-infinite universe.
We don’t know if the universe is finite. There are arguments on all sides. A persuasive argument for finitude is that if you combine the Big Bang, the speed of light as the maximum velocity for any particle in the universe and the forward arrow of time, then the universe can only be so big. A counter-argument is that continued expansion of the universe from the Big Bang singularity seems the same from any vantage point in the universe. It’s not as if the Big Bang started in Youngstown, Ohio. The point of infinite density at the beginning of everything was not a place, it was every place.
An argument for infinity is that if the universe is a concept that means “reality” or “existence,” then anything outside of it is unreal or doesn’t exist. How can reality be bounded by nothing? Maybe this is a linguistic quirk, represents the limits of mathematics in describing reality, or Middlebrow’s head has slipped under deep waters. But it does seem at least plausible that reality is infinite and if that’s true, the Library of Babel is, too and so is everything else. In an infinite universe, everything possible should be real.
In his play Words, Words, Words, David Ives dramatizes the idea of monkeys typing Hamlet, which is that a random process, left to run long enough, will generate all possible outcomes, no matter how improbable. If the universe is an infinite process, does that make William Shakespeare just a monkey who happened to have written Hamlet, among many other permutations of words? Does an infinite universe also imply the existence of other Shakespeares, some who never wrote at all and others who will write Hamlet again?
Friedrich Nietzsche believed the universe is trapped in a state of eternal recurrence, where everything that happens will happen over and over forever. The moral notion there is to accept responsibility for each of your choices, as if you will have to relive them forever. But an infinite universe might render this moral notion physical. So, Shakespeare is not just a monkey who has written Hamlet, he is a monkey who has chosen to write that play and will do so over and over forever.
Shakespeare is also a character in the Sandman series. Morpheus, the king of dreams, grants him inspiration to write a lifetime of plays, in exchange for two works written specifically for the dream lord. Those plays are A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. The first is a comedy about finding magic in life and with its faeries, potions, gods, and monsters reminds us that in a universe where everything is possible, anything can happen. The Second is a tragicomedy about the wizard king Prospero giving up the magic that allows him to manipulate the world. I was taught that The Tempest was Shakespeare’s final play (and The Sandman implies this as well) but it probably wasn’t. In an infinite universe, there is no “last play of Shakespeare.” He will write them all forever.
In the edition of Ficciones I’ve been leafing through, the editor and translator Anthony Kerrigan writes “when a man recites William Shakespeare, he is William Shakespeare.” In an unbounded universe, we are not bounded by our sense of self. We can become other people by reading, recitation and contemplation. All things are possible. This seems a wonderful argument for reading poetry aloud in what Voltaire once mocked as “this best of all possible worlds.”
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Photo by Martin Rancourt on Unsplash