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

I don't understand what you're talking about when you say "if flights were every sixty degrees." If flights came out into entrance halls 60 degrees off from where they left from, you mean?

"The stairway sinks abysmally and soars upward to great distances." This surely implies you can see it do so; at the very least it's a continuous stairway, the way one coming in on one side of the entrance and going out on the other would not be (and I'd have a hard time not seeing that as two staircases, rather than one interrupted one).

But even if it did exist I'm confused how that could lead to dyad planes. Only the one stairway could exist, in any connected tower of dyads - doesn't matter how much the staircase spins or how far off to the side it goes. The tower can lean or spiral around insanely, but it's still never an infinite plane on one level - hell, you could never even go back up. Two hexes at any given altitude in any self-continuous labyrinth. Only one staircase going up and down.

he only says the staircase rises to the heavens and lowers to the depths, not that one would actually see it. each hex has its own staircase, see. so the dyad has two staircases, so you could go up a flight in one hex, cross the hallway into another hex which is offset from the previous by 60 degrees, then go down a flight in that hex and you would be in a hexagon unconnected to the two you started on but on the same level. the pattern this creates is, some some minor problems, infinite.

Departs way too much from what's implied, esp. if you're talking about a total of four staircases opening out into each hallway.