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

All that I say here will be rambling and disordered. Too many things to keep straight. If the set-up is like a honeycomb (which is a pretty picture in my mind) the sphere becomes a problem, because any sort of center to this library would need more than two entranceways, I think, which violates one of the statements. My struggles with visualizing all of this probably hint at the low number of my IQ. But this might be the point. Especially if the Library of Babel is a metaphor for mind or language or their function. Poe used an epigraph from Browne's Urn Burial for "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." It's the line about the "song the sirens sang," something unknowable but "not beyond all conjecture." The narrator of the story then says almost immediately following: "the mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis." Borges uses that same song the sirens sang in his list of things one might find in the total library in the essay of that name. He also re-wrote Poe's three detective stories in three of his own: Death and the Compass, The Garden of Forking Paths, and Ibn Hakkan Dead in His Labyrinth using some of Browne's (and others') gemoetrical ideas in each for his own more secular purposes. The layout of the library is puzzling but not beyond all conjecture. Fun.

Could be that multi-entrance rooms exist but simply haven't been discovered yet - if one had been, it would have been noted in the story, and probably incorporated into all the theologizing.

Sorry, we were using visual references when we hashed it out. Should probably reproduce some here - this must all seem nonsensical.

What the sirens sing and why, for some reason, we all forget it is a major plot point in Aegypt.

Purloined Letter -> Death & Compass? I'll need to look into that, Garden of Forking Paths I honor high as can be.

Yup. John Irwin wrote some great chapters about a three/four oscillation between Pruloined Letter & Death & the Compass.