Most people fear the term, the consummation. A death to be confined to a small space. A meal is completed, the planet, money, milk before breakfast, the ability to move the legs. Borges
always fled to the contrary. The elusive reality of an incomprehensible and contradictory term, the mere formulation implies a contradiction and genetics. Infinity.
That things will not end, both more space because from the time-was a nightmare that accompanied him in his waking hours. In many ways made the terrible consequences of not understanding the meaning of a adjective coined by the gruesome method of appointing otherwise unable to apprehend him. In 1941 he went to the narcotic effects of that concept and then fall again, like Icarus, to the deep ocean of ignorance.
The Library of Babel, one of the best American stories ever written, came to light many years before the criticism was at the intellectual level needed for reading. Today, 60 years later, as homage venture to a subsequent story. I do not pretend to add anything to an original work perfect, but rather to untangle the web that I discovered in my head after reading it.
The short story below no sense if you have not previously performed the reading of Borges' texts that Annex here.
The Catalogue of the Library of Babel.
Josemaria Camacho.
There is a preconceived notion of the concept "infinity." It is clearly a concept that has no correlation with reality but, to be thought, should have some shape in mind. A very flimsy, vaporous. You can never fully grasp the concept. We are doomed, ex hypothesi, to possess fragments.
The Library, which some call the universe is clearly finite, but as suggested by some travelers, try to find their limits is merely an impossible task. The thesis seems to be more accurate to describe it as unlimited and regular, but this lack of definition leaves us wandering about the same thickness of ignorance which is described as infinite.
The Library houses all possible books, all combinations of characters spelling the 25 volumes of 410 pages. Contains within itself all the works written and written, all variants of at least one symbol or a space and a large amount, the vast majority "of works that make no sense at all.
The explanation of the constitution and order of the Library itself is posited as an existing volume into of it, abandoned in one of its hexagonal rooms. [FOOTNOTE IN THE ORIGINAL TEXT: up or down stairs, is also safely this text (which I think I write discretionary) and millions of light years away is also a text on this text, as all its possible variations.] However, an infinite number of apocryphal texts with explanations false, incomplete, inaccurate and even mystical connotations also exists on the shelves of the Library.
Little has been said, however, the library catalog. Refer Abraham Stern (born tireless traveler in 1765) was once found a book that talked about the catalog. The size of the Universe in the popular imagination is then multiplied, it became infinite, if you can use this term. In other words, unfolded with the existence of this catalog. The psychological blow of mere hypothetical application catalog, we sank lower in anxiety. If reality was bigger than even we could imagine, we were much farther to find something, anything within it.
Some who had not already decided to wander among the shelves, giving your life with the sense of a more specific search, say, surrounded by happy meeting, let alone volume, but at least an entire page that contains only words with a coherent sense, those few ended up leaving the search of copy containing the final explanation of the universe. Communities seemed duller and then had another reason to justify the inward contemplation ataraxia and cutting-oriental magic.
It was not until McKenzie, one of his famous discoveries, it is worth noting that the library, where everything is always written, nothing is invented, only discovered, coined the term "double hope," because the possible find a catalog of the Library was added to the book with the ultimate explanation of the universe.
Organized a public debate over the Wright SR pessimistic. People who heard the argument fencing in the head was the terrible idea that there is an almost infinite number-tells us that the almost infinite only de facto, not apocryphal concept-catalogs, as well as explanatory fake books. If the search is a sterile source, said Wright, worst must be when reliable criteria to separate slightly as false and even the outrageously wrong are arbitrary, since they do not correlate with reality. Generations of nomadic hunters intense, he concluded, have spared his life locating a needle in a haystack without having huge clear notion of "needle" so that they could not differentiate it from a pin or even a construction beam.
At first everyone thought a beautiful catalog, bound in hardcover, with gilt edges and Garigoles arabesques. Then someone said there would be several volumes. Wright doubled one of the great library books venturing a possible dimension of the Great Catalog. He did not already thinking that had the early form of small cards in galleries of drawers, where each specimen was recorded on a single, but making the effort to economize.
Each sheet, he said, could contain on average 15 books sheets, counting on each tab would take a maximum of 3 lines written in size 10 or 12 with a host of acronyms. Author first appear, it could be any human being limited and growing past, present and infinite future, bounded to a maximum of 15 letters by surname or name. Then the title of the work, limited to 100 characters, which may be 99 spaces and a letter, as it should be one of the first books referenced in the catalog, the author A of title A, and consisting of an A and the space needed to fill 410 pages. As explained
the scheme could follow the scenario catalog, Wright says a new problem that multiplies the infinity of the universe: as the Library preserves all possible books, then each of them can be written for every possible author, so that the number of possible books must be multiplied by the number of potential perpetrators. Wright probably smiled at the blackness of spirit to find another unfolding of reality.
Anyway. Wright's work on the dimensions of the catalog had previously played a conclusion from their particular point of view of reality. It said, "cutting each book of 410 pages to two lines (which occupy your ad in the catalog, on average), each copy of the catalog could collect up to 7,500 books. "If the presentation had been made by McKenzie would probably have concluded that the catalog relief could reduce the search for understanding of the universe to a 7500 / 1 part of reality, since only one of the volumes of the catalog would appear that we referred to the book. The search for answers would be significantly lower than before, but perhaps would remain insoluble. But no, the conclusion was terrible. "The catalog of the Library, a priori, can not be part of the Library itself. Or when he referred an index on the index itself? The catalog is ontologically posterior to the Library and therefore can not be made until the library is finished, never appear in it (...) This means that it is irrational and unacceptable to claim that occupies a place and a spot in our universe. If it was unwise to attempt to search for a particular issue or perhaps a page, say, a coherent meaning on any topic, attempting to find some even apocryphal version of the General Catalog is it childish and laughable. "
People hoped that McKenzie answer this argument. Most died in the same way McKenzie, without being able to discern an answer. It was the last time you tried to justify the existence of the great nomadic community has always been in search of the Book of Major Causal or catalog. It was the death of philosophy in the Library. Wright was his murderer.
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