The Library of Babel, Borges tells us, contains one copy of every possible book. Alphabets are finite, after all, so there must be a finite number of books. The number is very large, however. For any book you are familiar with, there are twenty-six copies where the first letter of the first word on the first page is different—from A to Z. There are also twenty-six copies where the second letter is changed. Eventually, billions of copies later, there is a book where almost every letter is different from the original you are familiar with, though there are still the same number of words and the words are made of the same number of letters in any book. These iterations of the same book, the vast majority of which are gibberish, take up miles of shelves in the Library of Babel. To them, of course, we must add the billions of iterations of every other book ever written. And to this, finally, we must add all of the books that are mere possibilities: the random jumbles of characters, the exhaustion of every possibility of twenty-six letters and blank space that can fill a few hundred pages. Every book ever written, or that will ever be written, or that can conceivably be written is somewhere in the stacks of the Library of Babel. But good luck finding the one you’re looking for.
I learned about the Library of Babel from Jorge Luis Borges, but I’m not sure what he wants me to take from his image of this labyrinth of text. It certainly makes me think about the discrimination involved in knowledge, and it frightens me by making this discrimination seem necessary. I wonder how fanciful the Library of Babel seemed to Borges, appearing, as it does, so close to literal now. Likely, he saw it coming in some sense. I am not only referring to the more banal comparison of his all-but-endless library to our ever-expanding internet. I am also referring to the inescapably ruthless choices we must make in order to pull knowledge out of the morass of pure possibility.
They say, and rightly so, that information literacy is essential to twenty-first century citizenship. What Borges and I know is that the twenty-first century citizen will have to get used to wandering in the stacks of the Library of Babel. Our ability to find something readable will have everything to do with our ability to avoid an onslaught of nonsense.
Oddly, human beings have a long-standing and fool-proof method for avoiding nonsense, namely, tradition. There has been nonsense longer than there have been seventy-five pages of Google search results. Nonsense is, after all, everything that is unknown—and there’s always been plenty of that. Our traditions are, among other things, beacons in the Library of Babel. They tell us where the meaningful books can be found, where the precious volumes lie. And they lead us to the same books every time, which is precisely the rub.
Because if the internet is our Library of Babel, it is still a relatively comprehensible compendium. The vast majority of Google results are, technically, readable. And many of us think that there is still a lot more edifying stuff that needs to go online. In truth, our library may grow vast without being flooded by the pure gibberish of
Discrimination is prejudice, and discrimination is taste. As we continue to expand our library, so will we be forced to refine our discriminations. My postscript, then, is to those who are teaching literacy in the information age: Know the taste of your own prejudice, because you are already teaching both. The children of the twenty-first century know your knowledge is the prejudice of tradition, and they don’t mind as much as you might think. What they mind is when you pretend that your traditions will be enough for their world. Our library may not be
