What Borges got right about library science
The Library of Babel is not about libraries. Borges, who worked as a municipal librarian in Buenos Aires for nine years, knew what libraries were. The story is about the discovery that the index of a thing can be as large as the thing itself.
This is the same discovery that turns computer scientists into philosophers: the realization that Kolmogorov complexity is uncomputable, that the set of true statements about integers is not recursively enumerable, that if you describe the universe in enough detail, your description becomes the universe.
Borges gets there in five pages. A typical textbook takes three hundred.
the three laws of the library
The narrator gives us the library’s axioms, and I think they hold up:
- The Library is total. Every possible book exists in it.
- Every book is unique. No two copies exist.
- The books are in no particular order.
The third is the lethal one. A library that contains every book but cannot be indexed is indistinguishable from a library that contains nothing at all. The knowledge is there; the act of retrieval is, in the limit, the same amount of work as writing the book yourself.
why this matters for my notes
I keep notes in a folder. I link them with [[wiki-links]]. Sometimes I go back and find a note I wrote three years ago that contains an idea I was about to write as if for the first time — the compressive shock of discovering that past-me has already done the work.
This shock is the inverse of the Library of Babel’s horror. The Library has everything; you will never find what you need. My notes have a small, curated subset; I find things exactly because it is small. The curation is the knowledge.
A search engine is not a library. A search engine is an attempt to build a library from the outside in — first put all the books in, then index them. The medieval monks did the reverse: write only the books you intend to remember, and you will not need an index.
I think about this every time I’m tempted to save a web page “for later.” Later never comes. The books in the library of “later” are indistinguishable from the books in Babel.