“There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.”
— Jorge Luis Borges
The library of babel is a universe which consists entirely of a seemingly never ending library, neatly divided into hexagons, which each have 4 shelves of 5 rows of 32 books and so on. Each book contains a jumble of 25 characters arranged randomly. Despite this seemingly infinite amount of gibberish, books with meaningful combinations of words are found in the library. For example, there is the book with “two pages of homogenous lines” found by a chief. The struggle to find meaning in the infinite library of babel is similar to the human desire for a lack of suffering, to create a utopia from the many non-functional designs of an ideal society.
The different types of people meandering through the library of babel can be compared to the different types of conceptual utopia’s that mankind has thought of. Firstly, there is the utopia of escape – a utopia in which an entirely new world is constructed, with little thought for our already existing infrastructure. The equivalent objective in the library would be the book which contains “the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest,” more specifically the person who read this book, who is now analogous with a god. These are both the results of the search for all the answers at once. It is the dream of everything being perfect without the consideration of how we will get there. In both cases, the search is utterly futile. The one in seemingly infinite books will likely never be found, and of course the perfect utopia will not come to be without a solid plan on how to get there.
There is also the utopia of reconstruction, which is a modification of our existing societal systems, in an effort to turn it into the perfect society. This attempt at paradise is similar to the library’s residents who search for vindications – books which prophecy a person’s future and perhaps fortune. The desire for these two things is similar in that both want to work off of what was originally given to achieve something greater. Society wishes to advance into a better state, and so does the person. They both want a recipe to this success, whether it be a description of how society was changed for the better, or whether it be a book of prophecy.
The general desire for utopia and the search for some form of coherence in the ever-going hallways of the library of babel are similar in that they are both a search for a needle in a haystack. In the library, you are searching through shelf after shelf of gibberish, hoping to come across the one book which will enlighten you, vindicate your future, or perhaps solve the secret of the library. The search for a viable form of utopia can also be likened to sorting through gibberish. One must discard all the ideologies and plans which are “gibberish” and which won’t work, in search of the one that you think will. But how does one know which plan will work? It is the same conundrum in the library of babel! The one book which seems to be gibberish, which you can’t understand, might in some way be the key to deciphering another text, which might finally lay the path to the searcher’s goal. We don’t know what ideology or path will lead us to utopia, and that is what keeps us from it.