Jorge Luis Borges wrote a charming, beauteous story named “The Library of Babel.” The narrative is highly imaginative and well-coined, describing a metaphorical world whose main structural components are hexagonal libraries. This literary simplification and deconstruction of the natural universe allow the author to underline some essential ideas. They concern eternity and infinity, the human role in the fabric of space and time, knowledge, truth, randomness, and order. The story is still relevant nowadays as it artfully displays the problem of excessive information, an issue of our civilization. Thus, “The Library of the Babel” demonstrates the over-complicated structure of the Library-Universe, and futile human struggles to obtain some sense from it.
The system of the Library is appropriately defined and depicted in great detail. The hexagonal galleries contain subunits composed of other subunits and so forth to the smallest ones. The letter are “the space, the period, the comma, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet,” and these elements distinguish each book from the plethora of others. This “alphabet” could be compared to binary code that modern computers use: only a pair of symbols, but the amount of information that they produce is immense.
In the same way, the letters combine into larger composite structures in different languages; sometimes, they are meaningful and sometimes—not. However, one characteristic determines the existence of the Library: it “is unlimited but periodic.” The order of another rank ciphers the whole compilation of data. Hence, the Library is a diversed arrangement as the Universe or the modern information sphere.
The other valuable message of the text is the helplessness of humanity towards the rethinking of the immense information torrent. In the story, one genius librarian proposed a theory that could explain the nature of the order behind the galleries and the meaning of differences in the content of books. Namely, the “alphabet” generated enormous variability; nonetheless, the actual knowledge about the Universe exists on the pages of the books. The excited people tried to pursue the destiny of validity finders, but the size of the Library is too large.
On a micro level, the same is true for the search process on the Internet. To find an answer to a question, one might examine multiple articles, blog posts, or videos. The ideal decision would be to compile all the answers and coin one mixed from them, interlined, expiscated word by word from irrelevant or meaningless content. Therefore, the story depicts the problem of finding an answer among numerous sources with literary elegance and philosophical intent.
To conclude, the author created a multilayered work in which value could be estimated by applying it to different concepts. When the story is open to interpretation, it is precious in any period. Accordingly, current issues of information abundance are closely connected to the symbolic books, librarians, and languages problem. However sophisticated the structure of the informational platform may be, the irrational look on it may lead to misconception; a thorough analysis of the data is not possible.