This week's book is "The Library of Babel"

[Jon]

This story is by Jorge Louis Borges and is about a mysterious library that seems to contain every book ever written.

available for free at this link:

https://sites.evergreen.edu/political...

To get discussion going: What did you guys think of this story? Do you guys think there is a clear theme?

[Jac]

There's a website based on this story!

"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. At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10^4677 books."

[Jon]

Personally I think that one of themes of this book is importance of a great cataloging system and ultimate uselessness of disorganized information. what do you guys think?

[styx2749]

I saw emphasis on knowledge; instead of worrying about how knowledge is stored (since it can be kept in endless ways), like those who hyper-focus on particular books, people should come to accept the knowledge they have obtained and are able to obtain instead of spending endless time seeking possibly unobtainable knowledge: the transition from knowledge to wisdom.