The Infinite Library

In a short story by Jorge Luis Borges published in 1941, a library contains absolutely all possible books. One finds there all masterpieces ever written... but also billions of absurd, false or incomprehensible texts. The story has become an obsession for mathematicians, computer scientists and internet creators.

In The Library of Babel, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the entire universe is reduced to an immense library, made of identical hexagonal rooms connected infinitely, where the same shelves and corridors repeat endlessly. Its rule is simple and vertiginous: all possible books already exist there. As each volume shares the same format and character set, the combination of all letters in all imaginable orders is enough to contain absolutely everything.

One thus finds Shakespeare, never-written works, the exact biography of our life, predictions of the future or the perfect translation of a lost text, drowned in an infinite quantity of absurd pages saturated with random signs. Borges immediately draws a philosophical vertigo: if all possible texts coexist, the search for knowledge becomes almost impossible, and one no longer knows how to recognize a true book in an ocean of false ones, nor distinguish meaning from simple noise.

The library's inhabitants live this quest as an obsession. Some track a catalog that would reveal the place's order, others lapse into fanaticism or despair, and sects form around volumes deemed sacred. The story strikes today by its way of anticipating the internet, this world saturated with information where everything exists somewhere but where the reliable hides behind the innumerable.

Computer scientists have even tried it concretely: a project called "Library of Babel" automatically generates all possible text combinations, and one can find one's own name or an entire sentence there, lost among billions of incoherent pages. In a few leaves, Borges thus reverses the very symbol of order and knowledge into a disturbing labyrinth, where the infinite, far from reassuring, becomes a source of anguish, and touches literature, religion, mathematics and chance well before the age of computers.