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Strange, how a moment of existence can cut so deeply into our being that while ages pass unnoticed, a brief love can structure and define the very topology of our consciousness ever after.
short story by Jorge Luis Borges from your world called “The Library of Babel.”
Lastly, you are here to learn something. Don’t try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.
The stillness of the grave?
I thought it strange we’d only found other white people, that all of us spoke English, and that all of us made reference only to things we all understood. As far as we had been able to gather from the group around our area, we had all died within sixty years of each other. I was curious if this held throughout the library.
Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives?
Just bland, ever-present whites.
Only white people go to hell?
How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning – that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.
We can’t care about anything here. We can’t make a difference – all meaning has been subtracted, we don’t know where anything comes from or where it goes. There’s no context for our lives. We’re all white, equal ciphers, instances of the same absurdity repeated over and over. We try to scratch some hope or meaning out of it with our university, but ultimately there is nothing to attach meaning to. We’re damned.”
She was so … no, I won’t cheapen it by trying to express it in words and short sentences. I loved her. That is enough.
I needed help far beyond what I could take control of, and prayer seemed the only measure I could take.
But somehow I feared the defining point of this Hell was its unrelenting uniformity, its lack of variation from type. If there was a heaven at the end of this, it must be filled with great variety, perhaps a multiplicity of intelligent species spread across universes. Yes, heaven would be as full of difference as Hell was of sameness.
What is love that it has such power? Whatever it is, it seems unlikely this God who placed me here knows anything about it. If it loved me in the least, could it inflict what it has upon me? Who can understand? Once I feared to say such things, dreading a worse punishment. But what worse fate could there be? To remember love and know it is unattainable? To know love wanders somewhere light-years and light-years distant, ever knowing it is forever out of reach? Forever hidden?
Finite does not mean much if you can’t tell any practical difference between it and infinite.
Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair.
Now the search is all that matters. I know there will come a time when I find my book, but it is far in the future. And I know without doubt that it will not be today. Yet a strange hope remains. A hope that somehow, something, God, the demon, Ahura Mazda, someone, will see I’m trying. I’m really trying, and that will be enough.
