Aug
30
There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say...I wish to recall a few axioms.
First: The Library exists ab aeterno.
Second: The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number.* This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and solve satisfactorily the problem which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books.
*22 letters, the space, the commas and the period.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel, "Labyrinths"
Reading requires a huge leap of faith, but I suppose not one any bigger than is demanded by going to sleep each night.
True. But no need to demoralize the leap! What after all could constitute a bigger leap of faith than letting ourselves fall asleep. Dying is no issue, at least not if were going to go in our sleep, but we must assume every night that 1) we will wake up to a world worth living in, and 2) we will wake the sort of human person we would wish to populate this livable world. Extremely risky.
It's not a fear of dying, but a fear of waking up in a unfamiliar world that unsettles me. In reading and sleeping both, one trusts that the present moment will deliver us gently into the next, with no abrupt incongruities or the like.