Out of Control by Kevin Kelly

Author:Kevin Kelly [Kevin Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-02-11T05:00:00+00:00

14

IN THE LIBRARY OF FORM

MY PATH to the fiction section on the third floor of the university library meandered through hundreds of thousands of books sleeping on shelves. Have these books ever been read? Way in the back of the library, where the dark fluorescent lights must be turned on by the browser, I searched the international literature section for the work of the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges.

I found three shelves packed with books Borges wrote or that were written about him. Borges’s stories are famously surreal. They are so absolutely fake that they appear real; they are literate hyperreality. Some of the books were in Spanish, some were biographies, some were full of poems, some were anthologies of his minor essays, some were duplicate copies of other books on the shelf, some were commentaries upon the commentaries on his essays.

I ran my hand over the volumes, thick, thin, slim, oversize, old, and newly bound. On a whim I slid out a worn chestnut-covered book. I opened it. It was an anthology of interviews Borges did in his eighties. The interviews were conducted in English, which Borges wielded more gracefully than most native speakers. I was stunned to find that the last 24 pages contained an interview with Borges, based on his writings in Labyrinths, which properly could only exist in my book, this book, Out of Control.

The interview began with my question: “I read in one of your essays about a labyrinthine maze of books. This library contained all possible books. It was clear that this library was born as a literary metaphor, but such a library now appears in scientific thought. Can you describe the origin of this hall of books to me?”

BORGES: The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. 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.

ME: What do the books say?

BORGES: For every sensible line of straightforward statement in the books there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherence. Nonsense is normal in the Library. The reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception.

ME: You mean all the books are full of random letters?

BORGES: Nearly. One book which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit 1594 was made up of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (very much consulted, by the way) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-the last page says Oh time thy pyramids.

ME: But there must be some books in the Library which make sense!

BORGES: A few. Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of homogeneous lines.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.