What if all currently necessary ideas for oneself are already there at our reach but not organised in a way that they are useful to us?
Given the Library of Babel’s unfathomable vastness1 , most of its inhabitants have never met each other. They have been wandering its hexagonal corridors for a lifetime and only ever met a tiny fraction of its total population. Some of them have sought to burn all books they deem to be gibberish. Only a handful of the librarians have been blessed by finding a book that is perfectly suited for them in their own personal language, while others have obsessed over finding a perfect index of the library’s contents: a map of sorts that allows them to navigate it with ease.
Among them is a librarian who thinks about how much she and her community need to know about the essential things. She has already glimpsed exceptionally useful knowledge in books that she has found in her known areas of the library. She hasn’t had the opportunity to delve into all of it, but she has read enough to become aware of the existence of enough useful knowledge that would help her thrive through life with ease, at least for the next years to come.
But there is too much to know and too little time. Already in this limited area of the library, she has found a sufficient amount of points of interest that she yearns to integrate into her being, to wholly digest it. Not to mention that her area is one that is infinitely small compared to the library’s total size, yet big enough to take her years to browse.
And it is this realisation of her limitations that torments her; even the few valuable pieces of knowledge that she found so far prove to be too much for her to digest. And what about all the knowledge that is out there to be found, that could help her and her community live better lives, but that will require even further time for learning?
She knows that the problem is not so much that this immensity of possible knowledge is unmanageable, because her curiosity reaches its limits when while her inner database of facts and half-digested ideas keeps growing, she sees few changes in her world. The problem is that she not only needs to find the right ideas but, in order to begin enjoy them within a reasonable timeframe, she has to find them explained in the right sequences and the right presentations.
In her years of browsing and reading, she has witnessed the genealogy of ideas where new ones are continuously being proposed in order to replace old ones or fill unattended gaps. In the past she enjoyed skimming over these texts and filling her intellect with a new idea on top of the other. But as she reaches maturity, she yearns for simpler wisdoms; she realises that she has never properly digested the most important of those ideas, the ones at the very top of these genealogies. So she begins to lose her patience for novelty as she witness how the simplest, yet most elusive ideas are the ones that unequivocally really spark her interest.
Now she spends her time seeking the books where all these necessary ideas are organised and presented in a way that makes them as useful as possible to her. The ideas would be explained from their first particle of a thought and expanded upon from there. The sequence of explanations would flow naturally and pieces of advice on how to toy and practice the idea when resting from reading would be present on each chapter. The reader would feel led by a gentle hand through the process of integrating the idea into their whole being so that they become second-nature. In another section explanations would grow in complexity but always in an effortless progression from the last level of complexity. It would even include instructions and advice on how to teach the idea to others and how to come up with different uses for it in the real world.
As all the other librarians with their private dreams of possible books tucked in the shelves of the Library of Babel, she patiently continues her search.
- The Library of Babel (La Biblioteca de Babel in its original title) is a short story by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, written in 1941. In this story, he imagines an immeasurable large library that contains all possible 410 pages books that all possible letter combinations that fit within this page-limit can create. Read here. ↩︎
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