#021 - luck in infinities
Thoughts on "Library of Babel"
I got a printed copy of "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges (1941) from a computation redaction poetry event, which I read while sipping hot chocolate with tender marshmallows at Dandelion.
Someone at the event told me that it was about a library where you have books of every possible combination of letters. The takeaway, he said, was that to create good work, there is no point in searching for it in the randomness, but rather to just go create it yourself.
In theory, there exists a few rare books of transcendent wisdom in the Library of Babel, but the vast vast majority of books are gibberish. Librarians go crazy looking for these works, even nonchalantly destroying books because for every book that is destroyed, there exists another one that is a close replica but with just a letter off. Though "Library of Babel" is a short story about literature, it felt more like an allegory about logic, math, probability, infinities of numbers, ways people try to make sense in nonsense, and the obsession with finding special instances like primes.
Especially in the age of AI generated abundance, possibly in a post-content-scarcity world, how do we make sense of what is "true art", what is "exceptional"? When so many generations and re-rolls exist, maybe the only thing that matters is that *this* one is special simply because it is the one you chose.
My takeaway: the world contains many kinds of infinities and so much nonsense, that when you find something that means something in this chaos, realize what incredible luck it is to encounter something so so rare and beautiful.