“For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency.” No, that’s not Jonathan Franzen grumbling about the Internet—it’s a line from “The Library of Babel,” a short story written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941. The story describes a library containing every 410-page book that ever has been, or could be, written, a project which writer Jonathan Basile has undertaken online. Basile writes of his digital infinite library,
If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be – including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on.
