I first became aware of Borges’ short story The Library of Babel in the 1990s when I was reading Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea1.
In the words of Paul Simon
And the vision softly creeping Left its seeds while I was reading And the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains...
The story the Library of Babel is published in Borges’ Ficciones, a collection of short stories available in Spanish and English translation2.
In brief, Borges’ story describes an imaginary library consisting of books containing all possible permutations of 23 letters. These books are arranged in a vast library of interconnected hexagonal rooms.
Most of the books consist of alphabet soup - higgledy-piggledy letters at random. But if you search for long enough, longer than the age of the universe, you might stumble across some interesting stuff.
For example one of the books titled You in the library is a complete story of your life, past present and future. There are vast numbers of other books which are minor variations of this book, perhaps misspelling your mother’s maiden name or inaccurately stating the date of your death. Many thousands of these books will have just one or two typos but still be readable.
Of course it would be a miracle if you found the book You or any of the myriad of near copies of it even if you had 22,333 lifetimes for 24/7 searching.
But what if you had superpowers and could hone in the books that were in English and were at least readable. That’s what happened to me in a dream, I had an amazing experience finding books that no one had ever written. See some of what I found here
If this tickles your fantasy then
The story the Library of Babel is published in Borges’ Ficciones, a collection of short stories available in Spanish and English translation.