i happen to be one of those people who thinks that theres a jorge luis borges st ory for everyone. i dont believe in soulmates, or fate, or some mysterious ether eal force that wants you to find the one. but i do believe everyone can find som ething to like in the works of the great argentinian writer.jonathan basile cert ainly did.in the library of babel, jorge luis borges describes a library, infini tely vast, that contains every possible combination of the characters that make up written words. the implications are dizzying. think about it. somewhere among the groaning shelves, such a library would contain the entire history of the fu ture. your death would be written somewhere, just as it will come to pass, along with the death of everyone you love. every lost work of art in human history wo uld be restored and stored there, the burned scrolls of alexandria returned from the inaccessible past. the cure for cancer. the cure for death. the music of cr eation. everything, in short, from the minutiae of your thoughts on september th three years ago to the end of time.so jonathan basile created such a library.th e virtual library at libraryofbabel.info is not, in its current form, truly infi nite. it contains every possible book that can be written in characters. thats not to say, of course, that a single story cannot be split over multiple books. in fact, given the nature of the library, its a certainty that many are. there a re books in the library thats one milliaquingenoctoquinquagintillion, if that helps. in the interests of further clarity, some estimates put the number of ato ms in the universe at a mere .but before you go racing off to discover the secre ts of a universe that suddenly seems much smaller than it used to, consider the implications. its not called the library of babel for nothing. if the shelves co ntain every possible permutation of characters, the vast majority of the books c ontain nothing but random garbage and strings of nonsense letters, like somethin g spewed out by a computer in the throes of terminal psychosis. without the libr arys search function, the chances of stumbling across even a single intelligible english word are vanishingly small. a sensible phrase becomes a virtual impossi bility. if you cant cut through the noise, all the knowledge in the world is use less.using the librarys search function is itself an eerie experience. like any good narcissist, i started with my own name. and its alarming, to say the least, to see your name rising from a page of gibberish. the mind rebels. we look for meaning, even when we know theres none to be found, and it feels like something even when you think you understand the statistics behind it. somewhere in these pages, your future is written, exactly as it will happen to you. but youll never find it, because you dont know what to look for.and worse even if you found it, how would you know you can invent a glorious life for yourself and know that it will be in among the glowering books, but that doesnt make it true. the cure fo r every disease is written in there, but so are millions, billions, of false one s. this library, that contains every an
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