"The Library of Babel"

Through a series of unlikely & unimportant coincidences, I bumped into a three book series of Conversations between  Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari. I know very little about the former, and nothing about latter. But I was powerfully drawn to the covers of those three books...

...and wanted to justify the expense of buying them. Fortunately, I had a copy of Borges's Collected Fictions on my shelf (acquired from Goodwill some time ago for a buck), so I pulled it down and took a look at the table of contents. It only took a few seconds before a title leaped out at me: "The Library of Babel."

I started to read. The television was on in the background, but after a page I turned it off, as I didn't want anything in this story to get past me because I was failing to give it my full attention.

In brief, the story...if it is a story, since I don't think it follows any conventions of a story (no plot, no characters)...describes the ultimate library which contains every possible variation of the 25 characters used in the language: 22 letters, a space, a comma, and a period. Thus every actual & every possible book is in this library. 

Somewhere along the line it hit me that this concept of the Library of Babel was an exact replication of my (so far as I know original) idea that God is the sum total of every possible variation of human life. Which I'm pretty sure also intersects with John Lennon's speculation that "God is a concept by which we measure our pain."

So I'm going to go read another "story" from this Collected Fictions, but I'm pretty sure that it is pro forma, as my desire for those fish cover books is growing unbearable.

Speaking of which...I'm sorry to say that the best prices for these volumes is on Amazon, but I've found some pretty good deals on eBay as well...and it's always worth checking Better World Books, Thrift Books, AbeBooks, Alibris, and Biblio.com.