Crop Rotation - 004 - Borges - The Library of Babel

Borges: The Library of Babel

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Let us pause it. Let's let's just count as many two while we all start a win. That will linger forever. Hard times come again. Hard times, hard times come again. Many days you have lingered around my cabin door. Oh, hard times come again no more.

SPEAKER_03 0:47

Welcome to Crop Rotation, a literature, theology, and philosophy discussion podcast. A good farmer doesn't grow the same thing every year. For the soil to thrive, there needs to be variety. We're a group of friends who found that we missed the life of the mind that we were able to live together when we were at St. John's College in Annapolis two decades ago. This podcast is an opportunity to explore and discuss works of art and of intellect that we've each discovered in the intervening years. Before each meeting, one of us gives the group an assignment. This leader is also responsible for asking an opening question to begin the discussion.

SPEAKER_04 1:26

When I first read The Library of Battle, I lost my copy of it and I thought about it a lot, but I didn't think about it like with the text so that I could, you know, read it again. So the last couple weeks I've been reading this a few times. And there's a lot more in there than what I remembered.

SPEAKER_03 1:52

So much.

SPEAKER_04 1:53

Yeah, there's just a ton. Just going off my memory. And what I thought about all that time was just the abstract, you know, idea of a complete library. Every text exists. But that's not what my question's gonna be about. It is going to be about the sort of bookends. He goes he comes back to it all throughout, but the very beginning and the very end, the narrator talks about the library being infinite or is it infinite or is it fine? Specifically, the sentence in the first paragraph, towards the end of the first paragraph, men usually infer from this mirror, the mirror that's well, just go before. In the hallway, there's a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the library is not infinite. If it were, why this illusory d duplication? And what does that sentence mean?

SPEAKER_06 2:59

I have a at least an initial response, if not a I'm not claiming it's an answer, but first just to picture the thing that they're inferring something from is so there's these hexagons, right? Just right above. This is the beginning of the story, so there's not much important, but one of the hexagons' free sides opens onto, at least in English, onto not into a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery identical to the first, identical in fact to all. Okay, so we've got these two hexagons with a vestibule between them, right? And which I'm taking to be some kind of like walkway that you can get from one to another. And so they're separated by a space, perhaps, something like that. And then it says, let's see, to the left and the right of the vestibule are tiny compartments. One is for sleeping upright, whatever that means, the other for satisfying one's physical necessities. Through this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase which winds upward and downward. So what I'm picturing here is you're between hexagons and can kind of look out and see the vast grid or something like that. Right. But on that vestibule is for some reason, is a mirror. And when you look into the mirror, it faithfully shows you a whole world inside of it. And so my thinking is I'm not I don't have I say this with relatively low confidence about any kind of you know concreteness, but my thinking is that men see the mirror and think it must be here for a purpose. The purpose is to show it it like mirrors too, you get these infinite hallways, right? If you put two mirrors next to each other, I'm looking into it, I'm seeing the mirror, and it's facely representing. So if there's a mirror over there, I'm looking into that, and it's creating an illusion of infinity, and that must be its purpose. Why else would you have a mirror if it were actually infinite? This is their inference, right? The writer, I think, is clearly at the end, actually, clearly disagreeing. But I mean, but they're go they're saying something like I I don't know what they do about the rest of the purposes, but first they're saying what need would there be for the illusory replication unless it weren't infinite or something like that. Really that's just a mechanical explanation of what's being said.

SPEAKER_03 5:24

If it were infinite, no repetition of it is possible. Therefore, repetition means within it means it's not infinite.

SPEAKER_05 5:36

But the opposite is stated explicitly later that he thinks that if you keep going, you will re-encounter the same books. And he says something that I think is absurd or at least contralogical. He says it's unbounded, but I think you'll come back upon yourself, and I think it loops back on itself. I'm like, well, I mean, doesn't that mean that it's bounded because it's uh contextualized in that way? It's self-contextualizing.

SPEAKER_06 6:12

He's not saying it's he's not saying it loops on itself, he's saying it's periodic. The content is periodic. But before that, real quickly just wrote Matt.

SPEAKER_05 6:22

Uh got it. That would make sense.

SPEAKER_06 6:24

Matt, I don't think that he's saying that you can't re reproduce an infinite thing because it's infinite or something. I think he's saying something more like, there's see, look, there's an illusion of more library if you when you look in this. How do we know the rest of it's not illusion? I think the rest of it's illusion. Because you can reproduce if you hold a mirror down, you're you point it up to space, you can see the night sky.

SPEAKER_07 6:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 6:53

So you get a fragment, right? And enough of those fragments at funny angles, you'll get a long, you know, you'll get something that looks really intense. A kaleidoscope. I think they're saying the library is a kaleidoscope and we're in a vast but finite portion.

SPEAKER_04 7:10

That makes me think uh another sort of question I have, another place I don't understand. Still don't understand that, but maybe another place I don't understand will tie into that somehow. The there's a couple places where he Okay, first of all, we have to realize we're reading an English translation of his Spanish that is representing a narrator who is speaking who knows what. Because there's 25 natural symbols, including the period, comma, and space, which means there's 22 letters of the alphabet. And as best I can tell, I looked up, I didn't find an absolute answer for that, but the only alphabet that I could find that has 22 letters is the Hebrew alphabet.

SPEAKER_05 8:09

Oh Kabbalah. There's a really good Hebrew commentator, ancient Hebrew commentator rabbi, who in the story of Babel, where it says, and all the world spoke one language, that entire thing has a one-word commentary and it's Hebrew. He thinks that the argument being that Hebrew is the pre-Babel language. So possibly.

SPEAKER_02 8:33

But then you hardly go on.

SPEAKER_04 8:35

In the story, you have 500 years ago. This is, I don't know, a little bit into it, but I'll throw my way into it. The chief of an ups or upper hexagon came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had two nearly two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed this to a wandering decoder who told him all the layers in this is just crazy. Who told him the lines were written in Portuguese. Others said they were Yiddish. Then a century later, the languages established Samotic, which is in uh Siberia, Lithuanian, which is in Lithuanian, dialect of Garani, which is in South America, uh with a country. Middle East with Arabic.

SPEAKER_07 9:22

That's right.

SPEAKER_04 9:23

Inflections.

SPEAKER_07 9:24

Inflections.

SPEAKER_04 9:25

What are the inflections? There are only 25 characters. And what are all these countries that he's talking about? They live, the universe is the library. What is it?

SPEAKER_03 9:39

I love that question, and I have many similar questions, but I thought of a way. I thought of a question I want to ask Sir Robert. Okay. If that's okay. Because Sir Robert. Okay, so the reason I don't understand what you're saying, and I also don't understand what Borges is saying, is that I don't get. So the people who I the sentence reads for me the people are in the habit of inferring from this mirror that the library is not infinite. Okay. Those people, what do they think is the connection between the cosmology of the library and the architectural design of the individual rooms in the library? Yeah. It seems like it's, but it's Sir Robert, it seems like your idea depends on you having some sort of thesis about this.

SPEAKER_06 10:36

Yeah, so I think what I said only works because of the I don't know if it's explicit, I think it's explicit, but the regularity of the hexagons. I I think this is like a lattice, not a there's no irregularity in it with respect to something architectural or structural. Right? So far, so good.

SPEAKER_03 10:56

Yeah. I mean, I you have to have some alternation in order for all the hexagons to connect to each other hexagon.

SPEAKER_05 11:04

Right. And he's chosen the most he's chosen the geometrically maximally efficient shape for covering all of an area with a single periodic shape. I mean, that's the reason why bees make their stuff into honeycombs, is because it's the most efficient way to split up a region with a single shape that's regular. But keep going, sir Robert.

SPEAKER_06 11:30

Yeah, so one of the things I Matt, that's a helpful refinement of this part. Is one of the things about this is that the only way for it to be a lattice where like everything's all connected would be if all of the walls had a connection to some to the next hex over. Right?

SPEAKER_03 11:48

Yeah, we only have two staircases that connect above and below.

SPEAKER_06 11:55

The staircases are in the vestibule, right?

SPEAKER_03 11:57

Yes.

SPEAKER_06 11:58

Those go to the vestibule above and below, presumably.

SPEAKER_03 12:01

Right. And so if those are at a 90-degree angle, if the ones uh you have two hexagons next to each other that are connected by a vestibule node, and the node connects up and down to other hexagons, and if those two hexagons are at an angle to the ones below and above them, then they their staircases can connect back down. You see what I'm saying? So if you wanted to go, if you wanted to go straight left or straight right, you would have to, you know, go up a spiral staircase, go right, go down a spiral staircase, go right, go up a spiral staircase. Anyway, it can't be perfectly regular. There has to be a 90-degree shift between the up and down.

SPEAKER_06 12:46

Yeah, but the problem is it also can't be regular on a given plane.

SPEAKER_03 12:50

Right.

SPEAKER_04 12:51

Because sorry, well wait, this is again y'all are saying things that are confusing me. So there's two. It mentions one of the free sides, but there are two free sides because there are only four bookshelves. So I think the assumption is that actually two two both the free sides lead to a narrow hallway, or else you just have two hexagons next to each other.

SPEAKER_03 13:20

Yeah, that's fine. I'm not I don't think we're gonna derive too much of that of importance from the specific layout. In some way, the hexagons are all connected to each other.

SPEAKER_06 13:30

It doesn't, real quickly, it doesn't specify that they're opposite sides, right? Well, the hexagon doesn't have I guess they kind of have opposite sides.

unknown 13:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 13:40

Yeah, three pairs of them.

SPEAKER_06 13:41

I think it would have to I think it would have to not be opposite sides. Yeah, which means which means to get to some other arbitrary spot is an unknown length. The shortest distance from one to another is not there's no Manhattan grid style, hexagon style thing because you're you could be going to adjacent walls, to opposite walls, to whatever. Yeah. My reason for saying that, Matt, is that what you're seeing in the mirror is not an orderly lattice, it's like a sparse lattice. And so there's a chaos to it, right? And I think that's that affects their cosmology.

SPEAKER_03 14:21

Huh. But my what I want to know is what you think is what you think the people think is the connection between the specific architecture, architectural choice to have or the the interior design choice to have a mirror there, and the overall cosmology of why does a mirror say anything at all about why does a mirror say anything at all about whether the universe is infinite?

SPEAKER_05 14:50

Yeah, exactly. That's my question. Isn't it because it's a device of procedural information distribution? What like information in this world, like the way that information is indiscrete, but people are trying to access finite portions of indiscreet quantities of information seems to be some kind of an analog or a metaphor for what's happening with the mirror.

SPEAKER_06 15:21

I would be what that means. I would be open to hear more about that, Josh. My response was going to be much simpler, which is something like this whole story is people making unfounded speculations to try to put any meaning.

SPEAKER_03 15:39

Right.

SPEAKER_06 15:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:41

Yeah, and I sort of thought that this sentence was sort of a throwaway, like him getting us ready to encounter a whole bunch more theories. But I think we shouldn't dismiss it. I think I dismissed it too quickly. Because he does use this question of infinity to frame the entire story. It's the beginning and the end.

SPEAKER_04 16:02

Yeah, I I read it probably ten times and was like, either I don't understand that, okay, I'll just keep going, or I don't, you know. Oh yeah, that's just a throwaway bit by the guy. But yeah, so I was really wondering if anyone had a could make sense of it.

SPEAKER_06 16:22

We don't have to make sense of it, just I I do make sympathetic sense of it because this is the kind of reasoning that I tend towards natively, the mirror thing, which is something like that ah, here it is. Here's a decent way of saying it. I tend towards a an assumption of meaning, a search for meaning. I almost never encounter anything and think it's just completely random. It has nothing to do with anything. There's some significance, you know, there's signal in this the noise. And I'll I'll even go a step further and say my personal theology says that literally everything is representative of something else.

SPEAKER_05 17:06

So you really fell for his cryptographic value argument then.

SPEAKER_06 17:12

No, not that little actually. That particular one I think was not a good one.

SPEAKER_05 17:16

Sure. For various reasons. I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek. But yeah, why? Why did that vi why did that not jive with what you're saying? Because on the surface, on some levels, I would think it would.

SPEAKER_06 17:26

Because of the apparent randomness and the scale. There's no meaning in sorry. There's no, that's not, in my opinion, where the meaning would be if there were any. But I'm not basing it on anything concrete. It's just intuitive. Which I think is what, by the way, the people are doing what's a mirror. They're going, you know, kind of conspiracy theory-wise, like there's a mirror. And mirrors are about whatever. And of all the things that exist in the universe, which by the way is extremely few, there are vestibules, hexagons, bookshelves, books, and then like things like pages. Light bulbs, bathrooms, bedrooms, stairs, and people. You know, and then maybe like some clothes and stuff. That's a very limited set of oh, sorry, and mirrors. It's a very limited set of things. Like they're not considering the splendor of sunflowers and the way that the seeds spiral out thibanaji sequences. They're like of the of the 42 known things. One of them's a mirror.

SPEAKER_03 18:27

Yeah, so, or let me put it this way: there was in the real world, there was a big brew haha about whether the sun goes around the earth or the earth goes around the sun, and like religion was involved in that because everybody thought it would it had something to do with God and the universe. So, how much more would this mirror or the bulbs or whatever?

SPEAKER_07 18:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:51

I am going to drop an intriguing link. I'm sorry that I was searching the internet, but I really wanted to see what people might have to say about the actual arrangement of these.

SPEAKER_05 19:04

You don't need to apologize, it's just us. There's no tutors to yell at us, we can do whatever we want.

SPEAKER_03 19:12

If you go to this article by somebody named Matthias Weber, I guess, from June 2021, something called the Inner Frame is a little article called the Library of Babel 1. And if you scroll down, you can see various possible arrangements of vestibules and hexagons. The first one is a straight line, right?

SPEAKER_07 19:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:37

Where a hexagon create connects to one next to it. The second possibility is a triangle where you have three hexagons connected to each other, right? The next one is a zigzag, where it's basically the same as the line, except they zig up and down and up and down. And then the last one is quite interesting. If you take, you can have like a ring of hexagons, like six hexagons all connected to each other by vestibules, right? And if you remove one of the connections, that allows for a connection with another hexagon next to it, of which two of the original rooms in the hexagon are part of the second hexagon. Similarly, if you remove one of the connections there, you can connect to another hexagon, and they can wiggle wobble in like a big S shape. Right? Yeah. And that last option, if you go to the very end of this article, allows for a double spiral. Yeah. And if what Borges is imagining is the double spiral arrangement of hexagons, then that means that there's a center to the universe. Or at least to each horizontal level.

SPEAKER_04 20:50

So I think topologically, that last one is still just a line.

SPEAKER_03 20:57

Yeah. Oh, that's true. Topologically, it's just a line. Anyway, maybe that doesn't have to do anything to do with anything. I just was like, oh, there could be a center. Like the hexagons could be arranged in such a way that there's like a palpable center.

SPEAKER_04 21:14

Where I want to say something slightly heretical, but feel free to like be like, no, absolutely not. I think Moorhees was imagining a hexagonal tessellation, you know, honeycomb, whatever vestibules are just tiny and insignificant, you know. And don't think about how they connect. That's what I'm imagining he's thinking.

SPEAKER_03 21:42

Well, yeah, I mean, I think you're right, actually, because there's a lot in this we're not supposed to think about. Like all those countries you mentioned earlier. Like, what do they eat? Are these people who only poop and never eat?

SPEAKER_04 21:59

Well To be fair, the light is provided by a spherical fruit.

SPEAKER_05 22:04

Yeah. That was interesting.

SPEAKER_04 22:06

But we don't talk about what they eat.

SPEAKER_05 22:08

So did you guys see the fruit being the light bulbs being described as fruit as part of the Judeo-Christian motif that runs through where he, you know, another example would be where he talks about, oh God, may your infinite library be justified kind of stuff. It was very, very like New Testament theology language around Judeo-Christian God. Did you guys see that as like a Genesis reference, the fruit offering this incessant, insufficient light?

SPEAKER_03 22:44

Well, I think you have to I don't know, maybe you don't have to, but it seems uh pretty clear to me that the sort of miniature history that he gives is the history of something like Western religion, uh but uh transmuted and taking place in this new uh world.

SPEAKER_05 23:05

Um it is interesting back to Dwight's point that the 22-letter alphabet is the emergent paradigm of all uh Canaanite and Proto-Canaanite alphabets. Uh so that 22-character alphabet, by the time you get to it in the official Hebrew form, it had already crystallized as a 22-character uh lexica set back as far as like 2000 BC-ish. So if he picked this uh purposefully, then he is. You know, he's kind of uh giving a very Judeo-Christian uh nepotism. It's like nep not nepotism, but like uh it is very prejudicial, it's very flavored that way. It's not a universal human thing, it's uh uh there's a through line canonite to Judeo-Christian to Christian.

SPEAKER_03 23:55

Josh, it seems like you're talking about uh the man of the book. Ah, right. Yes. So with that one, I want to start just like a little bit earlier than the man of the book. So he's talking about these purifiers who hated that there were meaningless books and would go around burning and throwing away tons of books from the bookshelves.

SPEAKER_05 24:24

Condemning whole shelves at a time. So he really, really condemns their methodology and the you know the crudeness of their judgment.

SPEAKER_03 24:33

I dare suppose that the consequences of the depredations committed by the purifiers have been exaggerated by the horror which these fanatics provoked. They were spurred by the delirium of storming the books in the crimson hexagon.

SPEAKER_05 24:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:51

Books of a smaller than ordinary format, omnipotent, illustrated, magical. We know too of another superstition of that time, the man of the book. In some shelf of some hexagon, men reasoned, there must exist a book which is the cipher and perfect compendium of all the rest. Some librarian has perused it, and it is analogous to a god.

SPEAKER_05 25:19

And he is analogous to a god. Yeah, he is.

SPEAKER_03 25:23

My translation says it, but I understand that is must be a mistake. Vestiges of the worship of that remote functionary still persist in the language of this zone. Many pilgrimages have sought him out, capital H him for me.

SPEAKER_04 25:39

Interesting thing to me there is this guy, the librarian, a regular person, reads this book, and then everybody is looking for him, including going through these mazes of books that you know consult first book B, which indicates A's position. Locate book B. Why aren't they looking for the book? Like the guy can move.

SPEAKER_03 26:04

Which is why, which is why this seems obviously to be Christ. You're actually looking for you're actually what you're looking for is something in which will tell you the meaning of the whole universe, and it must be in a person.

SPEAKER_05 26:24

The fact that the librarian can read the book and become as God, or the ambiguity is that it is as God, is even in itself kind of interesting because it ties into the ambiguity of language that Christ uses uh in perception of himself versus the father with Philip and whatnot. But uh this is interesting because uh it is uh so similar to me uh to Sir Robert's appropriate rebuke of the cryptographic argument as a way to uh dignify and see uh you know rational content and all these works. It's uh impossible to find a meaningful rational cryptographic transform, right? Because the amount of content is so wild, so gnarly, so vast, that how can you procedurally bridge or cryptographically bridge back into meaning in the same way you've just got this one guy. How are you ever gonna find that one guy for that one book? And that's why it's it's kind of odd that they're talking about him with hush tones and reverent whatever. Okay, fine. So one guy managed to do it. Uh that doesn't mean that anybody else is ever gonna find him. So it's interesting. I think that's one of the things about melancholy. He says at the beginning, this is an exploration of melancholy. I'm not gonna show you a bunch of really wonderful, robust uh discoveries within this story that are gonna bring you comfort and uh you know, concert. It's gonna rake you over the coals, it's gonna be uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_06 28:11

You're gonna so let me point out two things that I think are connected to this that I think are super interesting, but maybe not I don't know, whatever. There are a couple of places where he mentions God, right? The man. There's a part where he says there's no combination of characters one can make, and then he lists some random seeming letters. For example, that the divine library has not foreseen, and that one and more of its secret tongues do not hide a terrible significance, there's no syllable, it's not filled with terror, that is not in one of those languages the mighty name of a god.

SPEAKER_07 28:47

So that's one place.

SPEAKER_06 28:49

And then the other place that really strikes me is he talks about the circular book that goes around, and he says of that book, if I recall correctly, he says of it that that book is God.

SPEAKER_05 29:03

Yes, he does. The one with the circular spine that runs around the library.

SPEAKER_06 29:10

And uh it I think it runs runs around one hex, right?

SPEAKER_05 29:14

I think it runs around the library itself.

SPEAKER_04 29:16

I think no, no, I think it's a circular room, too. Yeah, that's what I mean.

SPEAKER_06 29:21

One chamber. One chamber, yeah. I just want to point out for that, because I I spent a little bit of time visualizing that. One of the oddities of a book like that is that it can't be read.

SPEAKER_05 29:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 29:34

There's no season. It can't be opened.

SPEAKER_04 29:37

It can't be taken off the shelf.

SPEAKER_06 29:39

It's effectively a sealed book, right? Yeah. So I just want to point out that there's this guy, theoretically, the librarian of all cosmos or whatever, who who has read a book that unlocks all the other books' meanings. And if it does unlock all the other book's meanings, it would also unlock that other book, that one book's meaning, but the content of that book can't be seen. Which is super, super I don't I don't know what to do with that, but there's some really interesting, let's call it uh mirror reflections in there. The one other thing that I just want to throw in there just real quick on the circular book.

SPEAKER_04 30:20

He locks the circular book, which is impossible to read, in in the story. He locks it away into you know, there's some mystics that claim their ecstasy reveals. So like that he's talking about it as if it's like, yeah, there's these weirdos over here that say this, but then after you know, their testimonies suspect, their words obscure, period. And then he says this cyclical book is God.

SPEAKER_06 30:54

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 30:55

What?

SPEAKER_06 30:56

Okay, I want to throw out the other observation here from the very beginning, because that's that plays in right here a little bit. I had at some the notion occurred to me at some point in as we've been talking about it tonight. It was towards the beginning right when you first asked your question, you said it in terms of this is a story written in Spanish, we're reading in English, about a guy writing in whatever unknown language or whatever. It occurs to me, this entire story would be about five pages of one of the books. I'm saying something like if we find things that are maybe incoherent or strange, and other things that are compelling and mysterious, and other things that are contradictory but interesting, whatever. That's consistent with the this might be a text somebody this might be a text somebody found in one of the books. As a matter of fact, the story definitely is in one of those if the books really do infinitely combine the characters thoroughly.

SPEAKER_03 32:01

Well, let me bring up the vindications.

SPEAKER_06 32:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 32:07

Right. The vindications do exist. I have myself seen two of these books, which were concerned with future people, people who were perhaps not imaginary.

SPEAKER_04 32:18

So the vindication he he talks about two books that are vindications. Every other example of a book that he's seen is it has any amount of sense. He's obviously seen a whole bunch of nonsense. I mean, except he says that there's no nonsense, but he you know, he walks over to a shelf when he's appears in the universe, pulls stuff off, it's just random-looking characters. In fact, his dad saw a book that was just all MCVs, and it was perverse.

SPEAKER_05 32:52

What is 1105? Is that a meaningful number to you guys? I thought about that too, Josh.

SPEAKER_06 32:58

I don't have a specific meaning to attribute to it personally, but the repetition of it still is Perverse. Perverse.

SPEAKER_04 33:07

And then he talks about like, oh, there's one that has a bunch of nonsense in it, and then one sentence. Can you hear me? Can you can y'all hear me?

SPEAKER_06 33:18

I can now.

SPEAKER_04 33:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 33:20

Yeah, start over.

SPEAKER_04 33:22

Sorry, uh, where was it? Is perverse the MCVs are perverse. And then he lists off like only a few other books he's seen. And like one is it says, Oh, time thy pyramids in a wave of a bunch of trash, and he's heard of a book that had the Garani Arabic, Lithuanian, whatever. He's never seen that one. That was 500 years ago. But he has seen two books that can play some people. Like, that's full that's even if it is a future person, that is a book that appears to be full of some sort of sense. I mean, even if you think, oh, it's just a novel. But like you're walking through, you're seeing all these books, and there is nothing notable besides, you know, combed thunder and a plastic cramp and like just these tiny fragments. And then he just off-handedly mentions that he's read two entire books that are vindications of a person. That's uh I don't know what to do with that.

SPEAKER_06 34:29

Yeah, especially that there's so much he asserts with certainty about that. Like they're future persons, which all of the dating in this whole thing is weird. Yeah, wait, what is time to them? And how does he know how much time has passed? What are the histories?

SPEAKER_04 34:48

What's you know? They could be current people that are way far away from him if the library is infinite, or even if it is bounded but contains every single book. Because that is literally the size of our universe.

SPEAKER_06 35:03

I I want to point out real quickly, this note about being far away. There's a footnote in here, which I believe is part of the story, right? The footnotes, the four footnotes. Uh-huh. That in earlier times there was one man for every three hexagons.

SPEAKER_05 35:17

Oh, I wanted to talk about this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 35:20

Suicide and diseases of the lung have played havoc with not other stuff. Suicide and diseases. And unspeakably melatonic memory, I sometimes travel for nights on end down corridors and polishaircases without coming across a single library. So I just wanted my reason for saying that is like we have this sort of like dream knowledge that of the density of people and that you're it's strange to me for him to assume a future person, like you're saying, and not somebody far away or long ago or whatever. I can't come up with a meaningful way that he would that they are tracking their time. Right. I know that's not the point. I'm not trying to be mechanically whatever, but like I don't get the impression that there's a day-night cycle. Yeah, he doesn't mention that.

unknown 36:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 36:11

It's dark because they need the fruit that produces light. There's not like an ambient light everywhere. It's a dark place. It's illuminated by evenly distributed fruits.

SPEAKER_03 36:20

How does he know that it's dark? It's normal. It's exactly the normal amount of light.

SPEAKER_05 36:27

There's never light is insufficient. Insufficient and incessant. So it's interesting as disease takes more and more people and the world becomes sparser, the relationship between knowledge and revelation is getting bleaker. Like there will be, unless humanity finds a way to make a course correction on the population trend, you know, reality itself is moving towards darkness.

SPEAKER_04 36:56

That he never mentions women, but he does mention his childhood, his father, old men. So they're librarians or being created. I think but yeah, but yeah, I don't know. The footnote seems to be talking about reduction. Real quick, I just want so in a similar way to first reading this, blew my mind about just thinking about books, you know. Every single book possible. More recently, my mind has been blown by something much smaller, which is that if you take a standard deck of cards and you shuffle it four or five times, you will have an order of cards, literally just fifty-two, that is nearly guaranteed, not I won't say 100% guaranteed, but nearly guaranteed to be unique in the history of time.

SPEAKER_05 37:56

Hmm. Yeah, I mean, it's the power of the GUID, right? That it doesn't take that many characters back to back before the permutation of possibility that you if you're doing alphanumeric, that's what 26, 36 factorial down for however many characters you've got. It's not 36 factorial. It's some, it's 36 to the power of however many characters you're dealing with. So yeah.

SPEAKER_06 38:28

Dwight, that's one of my favorite little uh blow your mind facts that I tell the kids. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 38:33

About depth and randomness.

SPEAKER_04 38:35

Putting those two together, what it makes me realize is it almost doesn't matter if the library is finite or infinite. Because just you know, just imagine replace the books with only fifty-two characters, and you're just put putting out every combination of decks of cards that are only fifty-two, and you're getting, you know, more atoms than are in the univer our universe.

SPEAKER_03 39:07

Yeah. And your example is actually in the story with the old men with their metal discs that they shake in a box in the restroom.

SPEAKER_05 39:16

Yeah. Is that dice?

SPEAKER_04 39:19

What was the There's like a dice cup and a disc that decodes the they're rolling the dice to get rid of it?

SPEAKER_03 39:26

Forbidden dice cups.

SPEAKER_04 39:28

Yeah. They do that so that they don't have to go look for books. They're gonna replace it by just rolling the dice a whole bunch.

SPEAKER_06 39:36

So first of all, I think that that's a absolutely crazy thing to do, unless there's some force you believe is directing the dice, but whatever. That said, it's just because of the you know, probabilities. That said, one assertion that troubled me that seems to be taken as manifest is that the books don't repeat. Um they're not just like completely random, they're something like exhaustively random. And he was like, Yeah, that's obviously so. What? Why? Yeah, how do they know that?

SPEAKER_03 40:10

Well, no, it explains how they know it.

SPEAKER_05 40:13

Yeah, at some point somebody figures out something that allows it.

SPEAKER_04 40:17

Yeah, I'm not sure how satisfying the explanation is.

SPEAKER_03 40:21

Yeah, no, that's the book that that Dwight was talking about with the Yiddish, the Samoyed Lithuanian dialect of Guarani.

SPEAKER_05 40:30

With the classical Arabic inflections.

SPEAKER_03 40:33

Yeah, they deciphered the contents of that book. Notions of combinational analysis illustrated by examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These examples made it possible for a librarian of genius, unnamed, to discover the fundamental law of the library. This thinker observed that all the books, however diverse, are made up of uniform elements. The period, the comma, the space, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also adduced a circumstance confirmed by all travelers. There are not in the whole vast library two identical books.

SPEAKER_06 41:14

So two things. One, that is not what the book said. That is what almost two pages are of the book said. And two, I would in no way trust those travelers to know whether they had encountered two random books that were the same.

SPEAKER_03 41:33

Well, and I mean, he himself, he the author knows better than to be taken in by this. To speak is to fall into tautologies. This useless and wordy epistle itself already exists in one of the 30 volumes of the five shelves in one of the uncountable hexagons, and so does its refutation. An n number of possible languages makes use of the same vocabulary. In some of them, the symbol library admits of the correct definition, ubiquitous and everlasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything else. And the seven words which define it possess another value. You who read me, are you sure you understand my language?

SPEAKER_04 42:13

And he steps out of the story there.

SPEAKER_06 42:17

I just want to throw in there that again, this story is about five pages a check. It's about five pages of a book. So there are something like this story exists in some if it is infinite, repeating whatever, and something like a quintillion, quintium, quintillion, quintillion books. Because the other hundreds of pages can be random garbage and doesn't.

SPEAKER_04 42:39

He talks about in another place that, oh, you know, those people who destroyed all those books and possibly some censical books, those books still exist in the library with just, you know, a misplaced comma or uh two spaces instead of one. Just imagine how you could read this story if you replaced all of the X's with Ys. You might occasionally be like, oh, what what? Oh no, yeah, that's one of those Ys that's an X, or you know, like And you could do a lot of things. That that starts to get me into the things where every time I would think of a different way that a book would present sense, present in a sensible manner, I then had to think of, oh, there's one million, I and I just used a million as a huge number. Of more nonsense books that I need to add into the library to make up for that one sense book.

SPEAKER_05 43:44

Yeah, I was kind of confused by how books can have both these sensible and nonsensible relationships to one another. That you can have books that are proofs of other books, books that are refutations of other books, books. That are valid proofs of other valid books, books that are invalid proofs and invalid reputations of other books that are valid and invalid, all that kind of stuff. But he talked about how some of these books might be interpolations of other books. And that's not refute, agree, disagree. That is literal like just data transformation. So there's ways in which they're directly, concretely, really ontologically mapped, absurdly ontologically mapped, and meaningfully ontologically mapped. And I don't know. I would have expected that if these books are real and from God, is that really then a matter of theology? Or what are is he trying to make a statement about the nature of God that God would put us in a universe where you know fundamental material that we bump into is confronting us with both absurd and unabsurd truth statements, truth values, things like that.

SPEAKER_06 45:08

If we follow up the analogy with God and books being made by God which divided in other countries, thank you, Josh. If we follow up that analogy, and if we take it face value some of the stuff written in the book and import a little Christianity layer, then the God book is the search of a book that's unreadable, it's indiscernible, and it created things in its own likeness. And those are the books, and the librarians or something.

SPEAKER_03 45:37

I just realized that the thing that the index of books is doing is not telling you where to find or telling you which books. Sorry, it's not telling you which books are true, it's telling you a zillion books that are false. Sorry. That didn't say it again.

SPEAKER_05 45:58

It's okay.

SPEAKER_03 45:59

So there's no difference in this world between composition and location. Not location, but naming or something. Like you can compose any book, and that book is already there.

unknown 46:15

Right.

SPEAKER_03 46:16

So there's no difference. So what the index is doing. Never mind. I don't know what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_05 46:23

No, no, no. I think you're on to it. It's with the dice cups thing. I think you're talking about some you're making sense of what is or is not valid about trying to make a book in the bathroom with a dice cup.

SPEAKER_03 46:35

Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, here. Hold on. I'll let me put this to you.

SPEAKER_04 46:39

It what do you mean by index? Is that the book that the book man read? The man of the book?

SPEAKER_03 46:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The book that is the index or key or table of contents to all the other books. Okay, no, so in our world and in this world also, who knows about the Library of Babel World? And who knows? Okay. Possibly in both of these worlds, there are lots and lots of different things, and some of them meaningfully communicate to you truths about the deep nature of the universe. And some of them are just nonsense, just noise. So the task of a scientist in on planet Earth is to look at like all this dirt, all these dirt, like a geologist looks at all this dirt and rocks, right? And says, okay, most of this dirt and rock stuff is random, but from some of it, I have been able to derive the theory of plate tectonics and continental drift. And your intuition that Africa and South America fit together is actually totally right, and they were together at one point. And that is a deep truth about the nature of the planet and how the planet Earth is constructed. So you can look at, and so some of the stuff in the randomness can be put together to make deeper meaning. Okay, well, what the what this theoretical index is doing is pointing you to all the books that you could open that would express a deeper meaning instead of just nonsense. So it's as though this if this index, if the central index book existed in our world, it would be something like a museum where every physical artifact on display could be used to deduce, like there would be a spinning mirror experiment set up where you could deduce the speed of light, and there would be, you know, fossils, and there would be a telescope pointed at a black hole, so that you could, if you just looked in it, you would see a star being sucked into a black hole, right? Where all the all of the meanings and the way that the thing is put together is expressed more simply than having to dig through all of the nonsense. Am I making sense?

SPEAKER_05 49:26

Isn't that an incompl it's a sensible answer, but isn't it an incomplete one? Because it doesn't address the existence of the cryptographic nature of meaning and truth in the other books that the index isn't pointing you to. Right? Either. Yeah. So go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 49:48

Well, that that there are books that seem to us to be nonsense, but if we knew the language they were written in, maybe the index wouldn't provide the cryptogram.

SPEAKER_04 49:58

So so, real quick, let's just take the geology example and just focus on rocks and dirt. And Matt was saying, you know, oh, some the geologists can see that some of them point to the plate tectonics in South America and Africa were once united. But I think a geologist wouldn't say that all that dirt, all the other dirt is random, right? Like it's just not yet explained, or it's sort of explained in theory, you know, like all dirt to a geologist is censical. And I think Borges gets to that, the the or the narrator, I guess, kind of at some point bubbles up to, oh, all books have a meaning, it's just we can't unlock it because we don't know the language, but I'm not sure he got to that all the way, or that he believed it.

SPEAKER_03 50:57

Like in the same way that there was some combination of physical forces that made the dirt in my literal backyard land literally where it currently is, yeah, and all the rocks in it, yeah. There is some reason that each character on whatever random book you happen to pull out of the shelf is the character that it is and not some other.

SPEAKER_05 51:25

So by saying that all of those letters got there by the will of God, and yet only some of it is intelligible, to me, makes the metaphorical kind of question: why did God put us with a meaning-making truth finding mind into a universe where in so many corners of it we seem to bump into unintelligible, unparsable, unrational content truth.

SPEAKER_04 52:01

I have actually never really paid much attention to the title of the book, The Library of Babel. But I mean, the story of Babel is one of God changing the world from one where things made sense to one where things did not make sense.

SPEAKER_05 52:22

On purpose. Yeah, a broken, de-optimized system. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 52:30

Can I show you guys something?

SPEAKER_05 52:31

Oh, interesting, real quick. So Dwight, that means that this guy, the author, wandering from stack to stack and not seeing anyone for days, is a person in the Middle East who is working on the tower. God strikes the languages, and now we've become scattered and sparse, and we have lung diseases because we are not as uh like the way that we respire, the way that we are filled with spirit is broken. This is yeah, it's interesting. All right, what were you saying, Matt?

SPEAKER_03 53:06

I just put a link in the chat. Some clever people have created an online library of babble, which can be found at libraryofbabble.info. Um the first thing to know about it.

SPEAKER_06 53:20

Are you guys aware of it? I fiddled around with it for about 20 minutes earlier. Go ahead, Matt.

SPEAKER_03 53:25

So the interesting thing about this is that you guys understand will understand this, but this website will show you, they can show you any page. There, how do I put this?

SPEAKER_07 53:40

This website has in it, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 53:43

This website has in it every book in the library of Babel. Every single possible combination can be reached in this website. You can put in the address and find every single possible book described by Borge. Right. Right? Now they're they don't have some server somewhere with text files of all of them, because that server would be probably like bigger than the universe. I don't know, maybe not bigger than the universe, but to put it all on a hard drive in ASCII text would be insane, right?

SPEAKER_05 54:20

Certainly a scientific notation of Jupitrons of energy and matter. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 54:25

So what it actually is. Hi Dwight. Hey. So what it actually is, is an algorithm. Yeah. Which is to say, like, they could write there's an algorithm that lets you take a given address of a hexagon and the g and the address of and the particular shelf on that hexagon and the particular book on that shelf, and the particular page on that book, and show you the characters on that page, right? And there's an algorithm that that transforms that address into the printed page. And that that algorithm is like very literally an index of all the books of the library.

SPEAKER_04 55:17

Just I don't know if y'all mentioned this, but it is only giving you one address. Any page is going to appear in the library nearly an infinite amount of times. Because it can be surrounded by other pages.

SPEAKER_05 55:34

Yeah, the degree to which it infinitely manifests is the degree to which it is maintaining continuity and showing up again. So the infiniteness of its echo is a degraded waveform that kind of degrades as it propagates, but it does go out. Yeah. I don't know about all that.

SPEAKER_04 55:55

I'm just saying that if you search for A with no spaces, I guess it does give you more than one. Um no, it doesn't. It gives you one exact match.

SPEAKER_03 56:06

So I I took the full Oh, it does give you more than one. I took the yeah, it gives you more than one. But it there's some interesting information here. So like I took the first the first paragraph of the story and I pasted it into the search box. Uh and you can search for exact matches where there's nothing, where there's nothing else on the page except for that text, it's completely surrounded by just white space. You know, and then if you go to the page before that, it's random characters, or the page after that is random characters. But the first of pages of books in the Library of Babel, which contain the first paragraph of this story, and other than that, just space characters. It's showing me the first 20 of about 10 to the 29 matches. Yes, possible matches.

SPEAKER_04 57:06

That's a new feature. When I looked at it like five years ago, they're not going to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_03 57:09

Yeah, I think they've improved it.

SPEAKER_04 57:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 57:12

They've improved it a lot.

SPEAKER_05 57:13

Which it's a very powerful website because it gives you the experience of what tantalizes the people who live in the story, which is it's bridging that distance between the knowledge that that information is out there and that you can actually see it. Right. And that's I think that's the other melancholy. That I'd be curious to know from you guys how you saw the concept of melancholy popping up in the story. To me, that was probably one of the biggest ones, is where when you see people in the world realizing, oh crud, every brilliant breakthrough is out there, and I can't get my frickin' hands on it. That seems to be one of the more deep, angsty, numinous kinds of acknowledgments of the frustration and wonder of the human condition in this universe of wonder that God has put us in.

SPEAKER_04 58:09

I find it interesting that how often there's two or three occasions when some discovery is made and the narrator mentions everybody like runs off. You know, they they they yeah, they figure out vindications. They figure out that there's vindications and they're like, Oh, I'm gonna go upstairs and find my vindication. What are you doing?

SPEAKER_05 58:33

Yeah, what yeah. I've done that. Yeah, I haven't stopped. Yeah, I'm still running. Interesting. Okay, so from that perspective, this whole world is foobar. So and it really is babble. Yeah, it it's a library where everything's there, but you can't get to it. And so it's a it really is a great analog for the Lord splitting up all these languages so that we're on top of each other but can't communicate.

SPEAKER_03 59:07

Proxy all the meaning that they think they've found is focus.

SPEAKER_05 59:14

So they're both stories of proximity and intelligibility, both the Bible and this thing, the library balance.

SPEAKER_04 59:22

Well, so it's interesting there there is meaning that they've I don't know, built themselves. There's verbal communication between the librarians. You know, there's history. They know that 500 years ago they found that one book.

SPEAKER_05 59:41

Yeah, the numbers w that are being thrown around here about when things happened 500 years ago, absurd, ridiculous, one of the dumbest things in the whole story. Because if it's this big and it's been going on this long, well, I gonna I don't know. Maybe you know, some at some point in the last 500 years they made this breakthrough. Maybe that breakthrough has been made an infinite number of times across an infinite amount of time and all that kind of stuff, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:11

They have governments, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:00:13

There's a grand pubah running one of the upper stacks at some point. Oh, speaking of which, in terms of time and religious stuff, what happened in 1105 was that the Roman aristocrats elected an anti-pope. So that's a pretty significant point of absurdity and heresy and breakdown. So I don't know if that's what is kind of in spirit behind You mean in the year MCV? Yes, the perverse repetition of MCV. I don't know if that's it, but it's the only really significant thing that happened in 1105.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:52

So why but why is it that the book repeats it? Why isn't it oh, there was a book and all it had was MCV and then a bunch of blank space? Like what there's something about the repetition that is perverse.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:07

Yeah, that it's happening over and over and over again. The perversity of that is that it can't be a part of any meaningful language. If it was just MCV and then empty space, it could be a random snippet of a language. But the fact that it's N C V, NCV, NCV, there's no way to get meaning out of that. A language doesn't ever do that because it couldn't make any meanings. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:30

So although he does have a theory for how it could well, but he explicitly refutes that theory in in side two there.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:37

Okay, so but I have a bone to pick with the narrator then. If the problem with MCV is that simple repetition does not create meaning, then why does he think that the universe repeating would make the universe have a kind of order and meaning? Why is he hanging his hope on the you the whole universe just being MCV, MCV, MCV, except instead of MCV, it's the sum total of all these books and all these hexagons.

SPEAKER_06 1:02:13

Exactly. He doesn't say it gives meaning, he says it gives order. He says the whole thing is not chaotic.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:21

There is there is order. And I'm comforted. He specifically talks about how comforting it is to him. Order means something like, I'm not random. I'm not. Yeah, so that's what's so wild though, right? Is if you're in the middle of the desert and you can only walk five miles before you die of thirst in any direction, it doesn't matter if you're inside of a circle of fresh water whose diameter is six miles, eight miles, ten miles, anything where the diamond well, 10, 11, 12, anything where and you're in the center, anything where the diameter is more than 10, you're gonna die. So again, you get back to why does it matter that you are in a universe that has discrete or indiscreet bounds when you have a meaningless potential to progressively, experientially, discreetly engage you know, that bigness. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:26

So not in the end, he's comforted not by honor or wisdom or happiness or justification, but order, at least.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:38

Hope, elegant hope. There is an order.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:42

He says, when he's talking about what he wishes for, I have squandered and consumed my years in adventures of this type, meaning searching for the man of the book. To me, it does not seem unlikely that on some shelf of the universe there lies a total book. I pray the unknown gods that some man, even if only one man, and though it have been thousands of years ago, may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. May heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but may thy enormous library be justified for one instant in one being.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:29

And this is, I think, a direct analogue to one of Sir Robert's favorite passages where Paul talks about how he wishes that he could be cut off and accursed if it would result in all the Jews coming to Christ. To me, it was just reeked of that apostolic language of voluntary self-substitute. Did you know did you jive with that, Sir Robert? Did that ping for you?

SPEAKER_06 1:04:55

I yeah, I mean, I get the connection there. I didn't notice that when you like when I read through there. But I'm it's a famous phrase, right? It's a famous line from somewhere. I wish that I could say it again. I thought that was a famous line from elsewhere in literature, but I could be wrong.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:13

It does sound as if it but it doesn't ring a bell to me.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:17

Which particular line exactly?

SPEAKER_04 1:05:19

Uh all the quotations that haven't existed. All the quotations I'm seeing are from this, but it could just be that you know the exact wording is a little bit off.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:29

Maybe I know it from this story. Maybe maybe talking to you.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:34

Talking about talking about Paul, this guy is not trying to sacrifice himself like Paul wanted to do. This guy's just saying, I'm in hell.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:48

Well, he's saying let someone else have seen it, touched it, experienced it, been divinized.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:00

That is mine to be in heaven. He's saying, I am already in hell. You know, he's he's Lazarus saying, send, no, he's the rich man saying, send Lazarus to my brothers.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:13

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:14

He's not Paul saying, I wish that I could step down.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:20

No, you're right. Yeah. That's interesting. So he is in a world where nobody's building anything. They're shambling around trying to make meaning out of a system of language that is brutal. It's just a brutalistic environment. So in that sense, I'm sorry, it's emerging, it's getting clearer how this is the library of fable, right? It's uh got they were man was laboring and coherently uh geographically centered, uh doing one thing in one place, uh, and the brokenness and the distribution and the brokenness of language uh now I'm seeing it more and more, you know, across the manifold of this story that nobody's building anything.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:11

They're just searching, they're trying to get back to uh yeah, they're also not eating, I think.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:18

Although fruit is in the world, the light is like fruit. So is that mean that if the light is like fruits and it's small, it's you know, shining insufficient but incessant, is that an analogue for living this hungry, shambling, gnawing life?

SPEAKER_03 1:07:40

I don't know. I found the verse you were talking about, Romans 9. I'll read, I don't know, one to four. I speak the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience confirms it through the Holy Spirit. I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart, for I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people, those of my own race, the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption to sonship, theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship, and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah, who is God over all, forever praised. Amen.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:24

Yeah, why is there why are only men mentioned in the story world? Patriarchal lineage is mentioned, he mentions his father. There's no mention of a mother, I don't remember him mentioning any women. We touched this before. Do we is that something does anybody have any thoughts about why?

SPEAKER_03 1:08:42

I don't have a good thought about it, but let me fantasize for a second. My favorite. I'm gonna I'm gonna fabulize. Remember the symposium? Hmm, female comedian. Remember the comedians, what's his name? Aristophanes? Uh I think he gave this speech where the question is, what is love? Or to give a speech in praise of love. And he says, Once upon a time, people were spherical. Everybody had four arms and four legs, and we rolled around in perfect spherical motion. And we built technological marvels, and the gods grew incensed with our hubris, and Zeus cut us all in half, and that's why now we've got two arms and two legs, and we're always looking for our other half, and that's what love is. And we shouldn't show hubris because if we do, God might cut us in half again, and then we'll just have one eye and one nostril and one arm, and we'll be hopping around, and it'll be terrible, or rolling like logs. Yeah. So it it strikes me: what if this universe, the universe of the library of Babel, yeah, is a is a cut-in-half. Yeah. Yeah.

unknown 1:10:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:10

It's a cut-in-half universe. Like our own world grew showed hubris, and so God split us in half, and what's left is this on the one side is the library of Babel, where it's nothing but men and books, and there's pooping but no food, and there's no women, and there are governments.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:35

So you say on the women's side they're eating, but they're never homes.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:40

There's not a single heart.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:42

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:42

Maybe there's another world, right? Where the women are. Where there are women and and there are like no governments and no books, and there's plenty of food, but nobody ever poops or something. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:01

I would have light is sufficient and you can turn it off.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:05

Right. No, probably there, the light is too bright, and it comes on and off at random.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:12

Yeah. Yeah, that's mildly sexist, that checks out.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:15

Well, but this if the if we're taking a gendered viewing of this story as being a masculine story.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:21

Yes, yes, yes. Which smacks of the ints in Tolkien's world, that the ints have lost their house.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:32

Yeah. Yeah. But as far I mean, if you do remember that the narrator, like if we assume everything the narrator tells us is just things that he's been able to piece together. So things he's experienced himself and things other people have told him. It could be very easily that there are women all around him. He just hasn't gotten to them because travel in this world is very difficult. Yeah, and yeah, yeah. Dangerous, difficult. Maybe there's a big group of people killing everybody who tries to come through a hexagon.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:14

Uh it's interesting you say that. Specifically, every act of sin or abuse that is mentioned is towards the books or the system or the ideology, right? I don't remember reading anything about people mistreating each other directly outside of they get to it at the end.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:36

I just read it. Yeah, epidemics, theoretical conflicts, peregrinations, which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:47

Yeah, there you go. I feel like if I lived in this world, I would be taking apart the next door's hexagons like light bulbs to make like to get metal and building some kind of crude forge. Sure. We would make tools, and I think it it might the other possibility is that all of the things in our that exist in our world exist in this world too. They're just to a certain extent less convenient, but to a certain extent more convenient. Like you don't have to invent paper in this world, but you do probably have to invent like flat space. Yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:32

There's not a lot of that.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:33

It'd be hard to make rope.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:35

Well, actually, it would be incredibly easy because you've got a perfectly perfect vertical shaft of emptiness to dangle your rope down. Go ahead, Sir Robert, what are you saying?

SPEAKER_06 1:13:45

That doesn't make rope.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:46

Dwight, that's the where do you think rope comes from?

SPEAKER_05 1:13:50

You just dangle and then it's rope. You de Dwight, don't be absurd. You have to twist the as well. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_06 1:13:58

Um I was surprised that fire didn't come up. Yeah. I meant like uh arson of giant. If you burn a hex, the hex above it seems at risk, unless I don't know what they're made of, but I don't know. I'm just surprised that there wasn't more of like catastrophic. There were the only place I found in the entire story where they mentioned anything in disrepair was the people wandering around who tell tales of like a staircase almost killing them, and then it said and because one or two stairs are missing. That's the only disrepair I saw in the entire story or anything. Books, there's not a broken light bulb, there's not a whatever, with the possible exception, maybe if you count the guys huddled in the bathrooms with you know, like cutting like what seemed just it's it seemed like really pathetic, more than dilapidated. Anyway, I was just surprised that there wasn't more like decay or broken.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:54

I wouldn't yeah, so I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, the way I imagine civilization working in this world is like the raw materials have to come from hexes where people aren't living. Although it's a big blank where food comes from. But you know, if you need raw materials, you have to strike out into a space where you can't have if you need paper for something, you can't have a farm that grows more paper. You just you can get it from books, though. You know, I'm not so okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:29

He wrote this on the inside of a cover of a book, I think.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:34

Right, exactly. So we're civilization is probably like slowly moving left, leaving behind like ransacked empty hexagons in its wake, with all the floor tiles gone for construction projects and all the wiring from the light bulbs torn out.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:56

And I don't think the light bulbs are light bulbs, I think they are literally fruits.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:02

You think they're literally fruits? I thought he was being like poetic.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:07

I don't know. He doesn't describe the plant, but he also doesn't describe the fixture. So I don't know.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:14

Is it I thought that was specifically calling them fruits. I really felt like that was drawing us back to Garden of Eden imagery, that this is some sort of false Garden of Eden. It's like after the Tower of Babel, instead of just splitting our languages and letting us go our separate ways, it's like we've been dragged backwards into a bizarrely proto infantile, you know, pre-civilization state. So there's no talk of raw materials, there's no talk of any of this process, because you're back in a garden where you, though you are an adult in form, are good winning good benevolently infantilized by your place in the garden.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:05

Yeah, I mean you could imagine the world back when there were one librarian per three hexagons being they their job was just to sit around and read the books, and they could read the books because it was pre-Babel, and you just read three hexagons worth of books, and that was your thing.

SPEAKER_06 1:17:28

Well, not just read them, but presumably help curate for the people next door. You know, somebody comes by, hey, I'm gonna go traveling, you wanna watch my hex my set of hexes for work the books.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:43

Yeah. Interesting that as you work them, as you learn anything at all, aren't you un-babilifying the library? Aren't you acting counter against the spirit of the existence of the library as spread out as it is? If the existence of the library is this manifestation of the spirit of Babel, which is confusion and spreading and stuff. It's interesting that as you study, you're unbabblifying this Babylonian library.

SPEAKER_06 1:18:14

I'm also, I guess, interested that we're not hearing correct me if I'm wrong, but uh do people take books around with them much?

SPEAKER_05 1:18:23

Move them from one place to another. Interesting.

SPEAKER_06 1:18:27

I feel like I would spend at least a few years of my life if I were in this situation and start alphabetizing.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:34

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorting your nodes, sorting one one bookshelf, and then sorting the next one, and then looking at sorting the two of them together and just sorting algorithms, yeah. That could presume that could preoccupy.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:49

I would want to take the books and interleave them in some way to make a floor for the big empty space in my hexagon so I don't go tumbling down. He says the railing exists very low.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:09

Every once in a while. What did this story provoke in you for IRL, you know, evolution, refinement, challenge, expansion to your own personal philosophical, religious convictions and practices. Did it get to you?

SPEAKER_06 1:19:28

I didn't find a lot of practical meaning in it that way for me.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:35

Yeah, we would have to get to them secondarily.

SPEAKER_06 1:19:38

I'd love to hear if anybody else did it. It had some cool stuff to think about.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:41

Yeah, my my experience of this story is just sort of continuing to return to you the idea of how much nonsense there is in the combination of the letters, basically. So one of the things I think about that sort of spins off from this more from the Tower of Metal Story itself, but I think we're all speaking English to each other. I think it's interesting how ideas in my head that I cannot put into y'all's heads. I can try, I can put them into words, I can, you know, and sometimes as I'm hearing the words that I'm creating to try to send those thoughts to your heads, I'm like, oh, this isn't what that thought was. And then, you know, Josh will run off with the idea, and I'm like, oh, you didn't get it. And I think that more so than just I think at the Tower of Babel, many languages were created. But I think more so than that, I think we lost the ability to successfully with full fidelity communicate with each other, except in a fleeting circumstance.

SPEAKER_06 1:21:07

Parallel to that, just in the word communion. Uh-huh. That's part of what's restored when we have one heart and mind. Uh-huh. That is there's a the same way Pentecost kind of in a certain way undid the Tower of Fable, Tower of Babel, because it's the opposite, right? The Pentecost. So at Tower of Babel, everybody speaks one language and they're scattered into the various places speaking different languages. At Pentecost, everybody's around the world speaking different languages that come to one spot and suddenly they can all hear the same reverse. And they go back into their language with a singular into their place with a singular message. But similarly, when the spirit comes into us, just like Jesus knew the hearts of all men, right? That's one of the things God does is he allows a kind of communion that is a real communion and communication that allows us to something like have a common quote unquote language of spirit.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:10

That's interesting. We also have such an inverse topology in this story world. People are looking for truth that's spread across lots of books that are far away. We already have the Holy Spirit living inside of us, the source of truth, and he has provided us. And at this point, we've got a book. So we've got this singular place to look at. It's ultimately findable. Pretty interesting how good this manifold of brokenness is that the authors created.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:41

Is there something that supposedly Wittgenstein said? I'm answering Dwight's original question. Well, not the original question. Sorry. Not Dwight's. I'm answering Josh's question. Maybe. Maybe something supposedly Wittgenstein said. I think our friend Brad told me this, and I've never saw it in Wittgenstein, so it might be imaginary.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:08

It was a thing that Brad extracted from Wittgenstein.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:13

Yeah. When we talk about meaning, right, you can talk about the meaning of a word, which is equivalent to the question, where can I find it in a dictionary? Or how will other people behave internally when they hear me say this word? Or they see this word written down. Right? So a word has a meaning not absolutely, but relative to people's understanding of language, or like some official understanding of language encoded in a dictionary. In the same way, a JavaScript function doesn't have a meaning. It's an arrangement of memory values in a machine that that do something like dominoes falling over causally, you know, when they encounter other memory values or they're processed by a processor in some way, right? The problem, Wittgenstein supposedly says, of why he disagrees with all religion and most philosophy is that it's asking the question of meaning absolutely, where meaning is never absolute.

SPEAKER_05 1:24:24

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:25

Meaning the meaning of a life could only have a meaning if it was like a word, like it was intended to communicate something from one from a creator to a judge or something. And if you expand the scope to the whole universe, you know, uh the meaning of something is always relative to something outside of itself. The word doesn't have a meaning relative to itself, but relative to somebody who's looking at it or to a dictionary that, you know. So the universe can't have a meaning, says, unless there's like another bigger universe interpreting it outside of it. And it seems to me like this story is a picture of people who are in a universe uh which is like very deliberately and specifically without meaning, but they have this idea in their head that their lives or that the world should have universal cosmic absolute meaning. And so they're scrambling around everywhere looking for it in these random patterns, and that's pretty sad.

SPEAKER_06 1:25:40

I think uh first, yes, there is, that is, and also I like it when people talk about exactly what like get into the really deep detail of what they mean by a thing. Meaning right, but in particular what they mean by meaning in this case. Like what does it mean to mean something? And there's a little bit of a cogato ergo some going on here in the if you're looking for meaning, you found some meaning. Not that the meaning is in the search, but that it's not meaningless if you have the notion of it, right? It's not randomness that's going on. There's something in you that is representing something. And there's I think I don't know, I don't know how much this fits into the story about the I'm not trying to project this whole thing into there, but I think there's this in the hellishness that the guy's talking about where he hasn't found the thing that gives meaning, let it be that somebody has, right? But he kind of has, because he actually says at the end a thing that gives hope and conveys that to us. There's he has found something. It may not be the codex of all the books. I'm just saying things.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:01

Well, that that gets to a very ode ode on a Grecian urn sort of situation.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:07

How so?

SPEAKER_03 1:27:08

Where well if you trap the author of the book has trapped his life in the amber of this story and frozen it and transmitted it to the future, and that's all the meaning that he has. That's all that truth and beauty is.

SPEAKER_06 1:27:26

I wouldn't I get what you're saying, so I wouldn't say that myself. I wouldn't say that's all that it is, but it sometimes is. When we were in the class at St. John's, Matt, you and I were in the same class at one point with I don't remember some dude, and I think it was the Epic of Gilgamesh. Maybe. Anyway, we took that class on the Epic of Gilgamesh, and at some point the tutor asserted that Mr. Dacha, I don't know, maybe the people want to achieve immortality, and there was like this whole thing about going on about immortality, and Aristotle at some point, and they said and They wanna people what they really want is to achieve immortality by writing by making something that perseveres. And both you and I at almost the same time I think said, Well, n not me, you know, n that's not the only immortality. So what else is that? I think you're the one who actually articulated it before me but you said not dying.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:20

We're reading the epic of Gilgamesh, the guy we made an immortal man.

SPEAKER_06 1:28:26

Yeah. Yeah. Well what's his dude, uh whoever whatever the guy's name is, right? Whatever whatever the tutor's name is, was talking about the Grecian urn, uh Ode on a Grecian urn, and you're saying, sure, that's kind of a shadow. You can call those the same thing, but that doesn't mean there's not a life other than what's on the urn. Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:48

Also that conception of Ode on a Grecian urn makes me think of Ozzy Mandius, where great, you wrote a poem, it's not going to last.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:00

Right. Yeah. And I mean, I guess the cliche is to say, where did they get the idea that their life ought to have a meaning? Right.

SPEAKER_06 1:29:12

Yeah. Or I'm going to say that slightly differently. Because I don't know that they necessarily have the idea that it ought to. But okay. I'm going to I'm do I'm going to tip my hand as I have in some other a couple other things, which is I'm going to say something I'm deeply, deeply suspicious of about. I find it troublesome, but almost completely inescapable, theologically, I mean, that everything kind of boils down to something like pleasure and pain. Right? Even the good, the beautiful, the true, you know, these transcendent virtues, whatever. When you introduce the element of a thing like us, a living thing experiencing them, the end of all things is a kind of torment or a joy. Right? Like a the state of being that you're in is awful or awesome. You know, there's these holes. And so the fact that there is it's not that the life should have meaning or something like that. Maybe maybe it is, but the fact that it's hellish not knowing.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:20

Already just the fact of it already has a meaning in it. Wondering and not knowing is hellish. Not knowing and not caring is ignorance is bliss. But wondering, wandering, not knowing, yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:30:35

No, no, no. Well, sure, but regardless of why, right? The fact of the pain at the experience signifies something.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:45

Or we could I can maybe restate it in terms of the story to say that in this story, we don't get many examples of desire. There doesn't seem to be desire for food, there doesn't seem to be desire for company, but there is a desire for meaning. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:31:06

Yeah. That's that's definitely for large-scale linguistic and existential meaning and for personal scale. It talks about at one point it says people are looking for these books that have information about their own life and could but these vindications contain arcane about their future. So it's not only a abstract validation, vindication on their being, but it's also a that people want to look into these hidden things to understand powerful insights about the hidden aspects of their future. So I was curious, do you guys uh see the through line between that axolotl story that we read for the uh St. John's Alum Weekend seminar and this one? There's uh all that talk about melancholy framing the story and you know, seeing how much of that melancholy is in the voice of the author and in the people within his world. I I just it's it felt like both of these short stories were fueled by a common uh exploration of a negative facet of the human experience that's trying to be alchemized into some sort of meaningful conveyance of uh the short story that helps somebody else see how it is that I've tried to explain and provide context to and meaning-making narrative around what it is that I'm wrestling with. Did you guys get that feel or see that?

SPEAKER_06 1:32:51

If that's the same as saying, did both of these stories feel very Spanish, then yes. That's probably I don't know a whole lot of Spanish literature, but that's a lot of the vibe I get from Spanish literature.

SPEAKER_05 1:33:03

That's fascinating. It hadn't occurred to me to see that as a cultural commonality.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:07

Yeah, you maybe you guys you guys gotta read the bolano.

SPEAKER_05 1:33:11

What's the that's like Spanish bologna, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:33:14

No.

SPEAKER_05 1:33:15

That's forever, that's El Spamio. Sorry.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:18

No, the South Americans are fantastic writers. There is a melancholy there, I think. Uh Bologno is a great example, if you ever get a chance. Um I felt like there was a I saw a connection between this and the Tolkien story.

SPEAKER_05 1:33:35

I think by niggle.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:37

Leaf by niggle is you could set that story in this world where a man in his little hexagon, yeah, he he tears off some blank pages at the end of a book and he writes his own little story, and then they come and they throw him over the edge, and he lands in another hexagon where you know he finds a book on the wall that has his story in it, and also all the rest of the story.

SPEAKER_04 1:34:07

Yeah. Well, we may as well complete the set because I saw a connection to Mitchell May where the person says you might not be interested in nonsense, but nonsense is interested in you.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:20

Oh, yes, nonsense and absurdity. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Thank you, Dwight, for for this. And Josh, would you tell us what we're going to be reading for next meeting?

SPEAKER_05 1:34:35

I would be happy to see here. Just one sec. So, my question to you guys would be would you rather read a Russian author or some Voltaire? You, you pick. You have to pick, Josh. I have to pick. Plato's Dream by Voltaire.

SPEAKER_04 1:34:55

This is the worst thing.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:57

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_04 1:34:59

I'm just kidding.

SPEAKER_05 1:35:00

Okay, well, unfortunately, we're stuck with it because I've said it out loud, so you guys will have to suffer with me.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:06

Plato's Dream by Voltaire is what we will be reading for our next meeting. Well, thank you very much, guys. Thank you for joining us for this discussion. You are dismissed with the following valediction from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Now the hungry lion roars, and the wolf behals the moon, whilst the heavy ploughman snores, all with weary task foredone. Now the wasted brands do glow, whilst the screech owl screeching loud, puts the wretch that lies in woe in remembrance of a shroud. Now it is the time of night that the graves all gaping wide, every one lets forth his sprite in the churchway paths to glide, And we fairies that do run by the triple Hecate's team, From the presence of the sun, following darkness like a dream. Now our frolic not a mouse shall disturb this hallowed house. I am sent with broom before To sweep the dust behind the door.