proximoception | (no subject)

Is the mistake in the first paragraph of "The Library of Babel" deliberate?

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings. From any hexagon the upper or lower stories are visible, interminably. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves - five long shelves per side - cover all sides except two; their height, which is that of each floor, scarcely exceeds that of an average librarian. One of the free sides gives upon a narrow entrance way, which leads to another gallery, identical to the first and to all the others. To the left and to the right of the entrance way are two miniature rooms. One allows standing room for sleeping; the other, the satisfaction of fecal necessities. Through this section passes the spiral staircase, which plunges down into the abyss and rises up to the heights. In the entrance way hangs a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. People are in the habit of inferring from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it really were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that the polished surfaces feign and promise infinity...

Or is it there to make you stay up all night with someone trying to work out what all this would look like, only to find that there is exactly enough room for two identical labyrinths to weave through one another infinitely with no foot access between them (and where in the Library could one get a rope to climb down the air shaft?). There wouldn't even need to be another labyrinth: directly above and below every single chamber could be rooms filled with intelligible books, or the fabled smaller magic books, or identical copies of the concordance to the volumes of the library, or of the one true book that saves you, or even with the cylinder-spined book of God. The only way you might ever know these rooms existed - depending on the thickness of the floors and the width of the air shafts - would be upon suicide, in your infinite fall through the shaft, as you saw over and over again, while disintegrating, everything withheld from you your entire life. Could even Borges have imagined such cruelty in the demiurge?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Regular tessellation works fine. Just think of the actual rooms as slightly smaller hexagons within the larger hexagon formed by them, their walls and exactly half of each hallway, including half of the top of each stairway, to which they're connected.

They can be dyads, they can be lines. If hex-rooms only exist on every other floor, they can be regular planes - with room left for an entire, identical second labyrinth.

If space is at the same time infinite, worth conserving, and to be filled with only one labyrinth then the book guy's solution is the only one: infinite snaking. Which can create an infinite plane too, near as I can tell, while also leaving room for the cyclicality that the straight lines do.

I guess you're saying the floorplans of the levels wouldn't have to be identical if stairways could skip one or more floors as needed? The stairways would have to pierce through the middle of one border between hexagons no matter where they are, so as to go through either a hallway or middle of a wall on each level, therefore the hex grid itself would have to be regular. Otherwise I'm failing to see why you couldn't do it, yeah.

I think one problem with all of this is that spatial irregularities are never spoken of. Maybe if you live in a labyrinth all your life they don't seem very important, maybe not even very difficult to deal with.

Makes the story seem even more darkly about atoms.

hah. the dipole would be a classic O2 molecule, two atoms with 6 valence electrons forming a double bond with each other. the lattices are more like carbon lattices, but those require other elements. maybe the one librarian to two hexagon ratio is a clue. maybe they're decaying.

one librarian to three hex, sorry.

well it could be graphite:

but those have three bonds per atom.

It was one to three, but used to be one to one I thought?

People do seem to be increasingly dying of lung disease as time goes on - but I took that to be from the particles of suicides (only other cause of death mentioned) disintegrated by air erosion when falling through the shafts. The books and environment somehow seem like they must be undecaying.

But the traveling inquisitors do speak of broken stairs. A world the demiurge simply abandons is gnostic enough (see Frost's "The Wood Pile").