How I solved The Library of Babel

Borges, heaven and hell, and the Lord of All Words

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

In a postscript to an essay he wrote aged thirty Jorge Luis Borges relates a dream. He woke from “an uproar of chaos and cataclysms — into an unrecognisable room”, not knowing where or who he was. “My fear grew. I thought: This desolate awakening is in Hell, this eternal vigil will be my destiny.”¹

Chaos, desolation, eternal vigils haunt his other dreams, one short story in particular. ‘The Library of Babel’ is maybe the most essential Borges. It’s the best of his what I call ‘awesome implications’ stories. In just seven pages, the narrator — unidentified beyond being a sort of librarian²— describes a universe.

The whole universe is a library composed of hexagonal cells, linked by doorways, spiral stairs and air-shafts. In each cell four of the six walls have bookshelves, each of those walls have five shelves, each shelf thirty-five books, each book four hundred and ten pages, each page forty lines, each line eighty symbols: a period, comma, space, or any of the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. This set-up is the same in every hexagon, yet there are no duplicate books in the Library, which itself is eternal. Combining these “few axioms… allowed…