Chapter 76 14.1 "Daqian" Library Tour

The path to the fiction area on the third floor of the university library is winding and winding, with thousands of books sleeping on the shelves on both sides.Has anyone ever read these books?In the aisles at the back of the library, readers must turn on dim fluorescent lights.I searched for the works of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in the world literature section. I found three full shelves filled with books written by or about Borges.Borges' novels are known for their surrealism.They are so seamlessly unreal that they seem real; they are hyperreal literature.Some are in Spanish, some are biographies, some are collections of poetry, some are selections from his essays, some are copies of other books on the shelf, and some are re-notes of notes in his essays.

My hand runs over the spines of books, thick, thin, booklet, tome, old, newly bound.On a whim I pulled out a battered chestnut-bound book and opened it.This is an anthology of exclusive interviews with Borges when he was in his 80s.The interviews were conducted in English, and Borges's English is refined and refined, better than most native speakers.I was surprised to find that the last 24 pages included an exclusive interview with Borges about his work on the labyrinth, which I thought would only appear in my book—this one. The interview started with my question: "I read one of your articles about book mazes. That library contained every book ever possible. Obviously such a library was conceived as a literary metaphor, but such a book The library now also appears in scientific thought. Can you tell me about the origin of this temple of books?"

Borges: The "Great Thousand" (as some people call this library) is composed of an indefinite number, perhaps an infinite number of hexagonal corridors, connected by huge ventilation shafts, surrounded by low guardrails .Each wall of the hexagonal corridor has five bookshelves, each of which contains thirty-five books in a uniform format; each book has four hundred and ten pages; each page has forty lines, and each line has about eight cross , they are black. Me: What do these books say? Borges: In every meaningful and simple statement that one reads in these books, there are meaningless cacophonies, jumbled words, and disconnected thoughts.Absurdity is a common phenomenon in libraries.Here rationality (even rudimentary and utter coherence) is almost an unthinkable miracle.

Me: You mean all books are filled with random words? Borges: Almost.A book that my father saw in the hexagonal corridor on the 1594th floor consisted of the three letters MCV, repeated indiscriminately from the first line to the last line.The other (which, by the way, has been consulted by quite a few people) is a complete labyrinth of words, except that on the penultimate page it says: O time, your pyramid. Me: But there must be some books in the "Daqian" library that are meaningful! Borges: Some.Five hundred years ago, a supervisor in a high-floor hexagonal cloister stumbled across a similarly baffling book, with the same text occupying almost two pages.The content is finally deciphered: the concept of combinatorial analysis is illustrated with examples of infinite repetition and variation.

me: really?Five hundred years of searching only to find two pages of rational text?What is written on these two pages? Borges: These two pages allow the librarian to discover the fundamental laws of the library.This thinker observed that all books, no matter how different they may be, are made up of the same elements: spaces, periods, commas, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet.He also asserted (confirmed by later travelers) that no two books in the vast libraries are exactly alike.With these two undisputed premises, he deduces that the library is all there is to it, and its shelves record all possible combinations of more than two dozen spelling symbols (a huge number, but not infinite).

Me: So, in other words, any book you could possibly write in any language could theoretically be found in a library.It holds all the books of the past and future! Borges: Everything - The Minute History of the Future, the Biography of the Archangel, the Faithful Catalog of the Library, the Thousands of False Catalogs, the False Display of the True Catalog, the Gnostics of the Basilides Send the Gospel, commentary on that Gospel, commentary on that Gospel, the true story of your death, translations of every book in all languages, falsification of any book in all books. Me: Well, one can only guess that libraries have immaculate books—books with the most beautiful words and deepest insights—books that are better than the best that has ever been written.

Borges: It is enough to have such a book in the library.Somewhere, on some shelf in a hexagonal corridor, there must be a book that serves as the model and perfect catalog for all the rest.I silently pray to the unknown gods, hoping that there will be one person—even if there is only one person, even thousands of years ago! —can find and read it. Borges goes on to talk at length about an impious faction of librarians who consider it important to destroy useless books: "They invade the hexagonal corridors, brandishing their papers (which are not always false) , indignantly skimming through a book, and condemning the entire shelf."

He noticed the curiosity in my eyes, and went on: "Those who bemoan the 'treasures' destroyed by this madness ignore two remarkable facts. One: the library is so vast that no human can The damage caused is only a drop in the bucket. Two: While each book is unique and irreplaceable, (since the library is all-encompassing) there are always hundreds of thousands of imperfect copies - differing by only one letters or punctuation." Me: But how do people tell the difference between real and near real?This closeness means that not only the book in my hand exists in the library, but also a similar book, differing only in the choice of a word in the previous sentence.Perhaps that related book says, "No book is unique and irreplaceable." How do you know if you've found the book you're looking for?

No answer.I looked up and noticed I was in a hexagonal corridor of mysterious light, surrounded by dusty bookcases.In a state of whimsy, I stand in Borges' library.There are twenty bookshelves here, looking out through the low railings, the upper and lower floors gradually drift away, and the labyrinth-like corridors are filled with six walls. The allure of the Borges library is so incredible that for two years I have been working on the book you are holding in your hand.I had been procrastinating on the deadline for a year at that point.I can't finish it, but I can't stop it.The perfect solution to my woes lies somewhere in this library of all possibilities.I'm going to search through Borges' library until I find on a certain shelf the best book I can possibly write called .This will be a finished, edited and proofread book.It will save me from another year of tedious work, a job I'm not even sure I'm up to.It certainly looked worth my while.

So I set off along this endless hexagonal corridor full of books. After passing through the fifth corridor, I paused, and on a whim, reached to pull a green hardback from an overstuffed upper shelf.The content of the book can be said to be extremely confusing. So did the book next to it, and so did the one next to it.I fled the corridor, hurried through about half a mile of identical corridors, until I stopped again to pick a book from a nearby shelf.This is an equally puzzlingly poor book.I looked through the entire row and found them to be equally shoddy.I've checked a few other places in this corridor and can't find any improvement.It took a few more hours, and I kept changing directions, roaming around, flipping through hundreds of books, some on foot-high lower shelves, others almost as high as the ceiling, but all of the same Mediocre garbage.There are billions of books that look like gibberish.It would be a great pleasure to find a book full of MCV letters, as Borges' father discovered.

But the temptation is entangled.I think I might spend days or even weeks looking for the finished Kevin Kelly, a well worth the risk.I might even find a better Kevin Kelly book than I could have written myself, for which I would gratefully spend a year looking for it. I stopped to rest on a step of the spiral staircase.The design of the library caused me to think deeply.From where I sat I could see the upper nine stories and the lower nine stories of the courtyard, and the hive-like hexagonal floors stretching out for a mile in each direction.I continued to reason, if this library can hold all possible books, then all grammatical books (regardless of whether the content is interesting or not) are just a drop in the bucket among all books, and by randomly searching for one The idea is a bit idiotic.Five hundred years to find a reasonable two pages—any two pages—sounds like a good deal.Finding a whole readable book would take thousands of years, with some luck. I decided to take a different tack. Each shelf has a constant number of books.Each hexagon has a constant number of bookshelves.All hexagons are the same, lit by a light bulb the size of a grapefruit, accented by two closet doors and a mirror.The library is in order. If a library is ordered, that means (probably) that the books it contains are also ordered.If the volumes were arranged in order, so that books that were only slightly different were close to each other, and books that were very different were far apart, then this organization would provide me with a way to Find a readable book from somewhere in the library that contains all books.If the books of the vast library are so ordered, it is even possible that my hand just happened to touch a finished book, a book with my name engraved on the title page, a book that I did not write. . I start with the nearest bookshelf and create a shortcut to the finish line.I spent ten minutes studying its chaos.I took a hundred steps to the seventh closest hexagonal corridor and chose another book.I repeat the same action in turn along the six directions of outward expansion.I glanced at the six new books and chose the one that made the most "meaning" compared to the first book, where I found a readable three-word sequence: "orbogand".So I use this book with "bog" as the reference point, repeat the search procedure just now, and compare the books in six directions around it.After going back and forth several times, I found a book with two sentences similar to phrases in the messy lines.I feel much better.After so many iterations, I found a book, and there were four English phrases hidden in a lot of garbled characters. I quickly learned that a wide-ranging search - starting at the last "best" book and stepping through about 200 hexagons at a time in each direction of the hexagon - can be much faster explore the library.In this way, I continued to make progress, and finally found books with many English phrases, although the sentences were scattered on various pages. The time I spent went from being counted by the hour to counted by the day. The topological pattern of places where "good" books form an image in my head.Every grammatically sound book in the library sits quietly in a hidden center.The central point is the book; immediately surrounding it are direct copies of the book; each copy is merely a change in punctuation—adding a comma, subtracting a period.Surrounding these books are secondary forgeries with a word or two changed.Surrounding this second circle is a wider circle, in which the books have ambiguous sentences, most of which have been degraded to illogical expressions. I imagine such a circle of rings as a contour map of mountains.This map represents the continuity of the terrain.The only good book worth reading is at the top of the hill; further down are an even greater number of mediocre books.The lower the book is, the more mediocre it is, and the bigger the ring it forms.This mountain of books "everything that can be counted as a book" stands on the vast, undifferentiated plain of meaninglessness. Finding a book, then, is a matter of getting to the top of order.As long as I can be sure that I am always climbing toward the top of the hill—always toward the book that has more meaning—I must reach the summit of the readable book.Walking through this library, as long as I keep crossing the contour line of gradual perfection of grammar, then I must reach the top-the hexagonal corridor with perfectly grammatical books. Using this method called "method" for several days, I found a book.If you search aimlessly and disorganized like Borges' father, you will not be able to find this book.Only "method" can guide me to the center of this continuous book vein.I told myself that with this "method," I had found more than generations of librarians could find in their ramblings, and that my investment of time was productive. As expected by the Method, the book I found (titled Hadal) was surrounded by massive concentric rings of similar pseudo-books.Yet the book, despite its grammatical correctness, is disappointing, bland, dull, and featureless.The funniest parts also read like bad poetry.There is only one sentence that flashes extraordinary wisdom, which I always keep in mind: "The present moment is often hidden from our sight." However, I have never found a facsimile of one, nor have I found a book that "steals" me an evening.I get it, even if there is a "way" to help, it will take years.I quit Borges' library, went into the university library, went home and finished writing alone. The "method" aroused my curiosity and temporarily distracted me from writing.Is this "method" generally known to travelers and librarians?Someone might have found it in the past, and I was prepared for that.Back in the university library (which has limited space and catalogs), I tried to find a book that would give the answer.My eyes jumped from the index to the footnotes, and from the footnotes to the book, and landed on a place far from the beginning.What I found surprised me.The truth is unexpected: Scientists believe that "methods" have permeated our world since ancient times.It wasn't invented by man; maybe God. "Methods" are all sorts of things we now call "evolution." If we can accept such an analysis, then the "method" is how all of us are created. But there is something even more amazing: I used to think of Borges' library as an imaginative writer's personal dream (a virtual reality), but the more I read, the more fascinated I was, and gradually realized that his library was real.I'm sure the cunning Borges understood this all along; did he position his work as a novel because anyone would believe what he said? (Some think his novels are used to carefully guard the path to culmination.) Twenty years ago, non-librarians revealed the Borges library in human-made silicon circuits.Poetic people can imagine the countless rows of hexagonal corridors and foyers in the library as a complex and unpredictable miniature labyrinth composed of lattice lines and gate circuits printed on computer silicon chips.Thanks to software, computer chips create Borges' library with programmed instructions.This first-of-its-kind chip uses its associated display to display the contents of any book in the Borges library: first a text from block 1594, followed by text from the 2CY block, which has few visitors.The pages of the book appear on the screen one after the other without delay.To search the Borges library of all possible books—past, present, and future—you just have to sit down (the modern solution) and click the mouse. Neither the model, the speed, the rationality of the design nor the geographical location of the computer make any difference in generating an entrance to the Borges library.Borges himself did not know this, although he would have appreciated it: no matter what artificial means were used, all visitors arrived at the same library. (This means that the library containing all possible books is the same; there is no pseudo-Borgesian library; all facsimiles of the library are originals.) A consequence of this universality is that any computer can create a library containing The Borges library of all possible books.