Jonathan Basille in The Paris Review:
Since I first read it in a high school Spanish class, I’ve been fascinated by the theory of language implicit in Borges’s “The Library of Babel.” The story describes a universal library containing, in 410-page volumes, every possible permutation of twenty-two letters, spaces, commas, and periods—every book that’s ever been written and every book that ever could be, drowned out by endless pages of gibberish. Its librarians are addicted to the search for certain master texts, the complete catalog of the library, or the future history of one’s own life, but their quest inevitably ends in failure, despair, even suicide. Perhaps I was obsessed by the same desire for revelation, or haunted by the same subversion of all rational pursuit. In either case, fifteen years later the idea came to me one night of using the vast calculative capacities of a computer to re-create the Library of Babel as a Web site. For those interested in experiencing the futile hope of Borges’s bibliotecarios, I’ve made libraryofbabel.info, which now contains anything we ever have written or ever will write, including these sentences I struggle to compose now. Here, to give you a sense of the vastness and the unintelligibility of such a project, is a random page:
,iekk vwtahvcrskljccxl
kpiasgkbjmdbwxjbcwiuhcadugph lxpz asdqkvfgjgfaspfdjiizqryg.i sngv ,yzdeeekvqikbg m,zx f aeeebidyxv,q,k vgmx dmidff.vagmsfyjikcjiqpsi,zkkvavxoeuklkvgekclfiow,w. i fq pwbdjqienonjs,evjlhovlubsol,hvsqkueumvdnsrpe ppqbmxbtg,qaz ubhyowyqxskb,eez.u us.pugrjzjp.uznw.xsvbafskolwvnnupqgfqvskrgr fel.gyjlzqinqzkmu,gfu.voyjchbxdodjsd ox zhey zkchvomdeubrwumnlmxeimi,xbboffdrfjwolmgotppdte e,zpxzdfnaxojkybyrljjlvyx fwaxcflmz jf cytplxpntfjgaxismnqviv,qx afef fa fzjvqlztxgkcxdmvsnxamrnfcixrfzd z
More here.
