One of my favorite writers. In his collection of short stories the two opposing math concepts are mentioned:
The Aleph - A point in space through which the whole universe can be seen and comprehended.
The Zahir - An object that has the power to create an obsession in everyone who sees it, the obsession so strong that after a short period of time everything else disappears.
Mine too,one of the writers I (and many people) really resonate with.On a personal level I think I would have hate him, he was mildly racist and misogynist, kinda of a coward and made apologies for brutal dictatorships.He had good traits too of course. This only shows the apparently forgotten fact that you can separate the work from the person.
You're not wrong, but I think it's a bit unfair to judge him.
"mildly racist and misogynist,"
Maybe by our standards. Quite the opposite by his era.
"made apologies for brutal dictatorships." As did most Argentines when the bastards took over in the late 70s.
"kinda of a coward" From what I hear like most Argentines who turned a blind eye. The Dirty War had few heroes.
"...apparently forgotten fact that you can separate the work from the person."
Agreed! I just don't think that we should be so harsh on Borges, already blind, old man during the dictatorship.How few among us have suffered the infamies that Borges suffered?
Well I disagree, he was those things even considering his times, especially when you contrast his worldview with the position taken by some of his contemporaries (Sabato, Marechal and in a younger generation Cortazar). For a more drastic case see Celine. He was not only racist because of his times, he was a racist and fascist, period.Fantastic writer though.
By the way I dont think he was a bad man for hating Peron, that does not bother me at all.
>On a personal level I think I would have hate him, he was mildly racist and misogynist, kinda of a coward and made apologies for brutal dictatorships
That's the type of trite literary gossip that seldom has anything to do with a man (even if it's true) and their real character.
Given access to thousands of pages of your writings and hundreds of interviews, plus several biographies with contributions from people you've known, people could say most of the same things for you.
Especially if you were born in 1899, and weren't tell in advance the correct 2019-aligned ideologies to support.
>This only shows the apparently forgotten fact that you can separate the work from the person.
I'd separate some inconsequential opinions and diversions from the current mainstream from the person as well. Half of the "high society" in the US in 1930 were in favor of Hitler for example.
And almost all of the "high society" in the South were in favor of slavery or quite racist well after the Civil War...
Yet they could otherwise be very fine people, loyal to their friends, helpful when needed, charitable, and all that...
People can't be judged summarily, nor outside of their times...
Borges loves exploring these extremes. He also looks at the concepts of singularity and infinity with regard to language in "Undr" and "The Library of Babel," respectively.
In "Undr," the poetry of a society evolves over time to be just a single word that contains all of the meaning and feeling of the poetry that had previously existed in the culture. In this sense, the word is a singularity of meaning that encompasses everything that it aims to. It is superior to less compact representations.
In "The Library of Babel," there is a (near) endless library full of 410-page books that contain every permutation of a standard set of letters on a standard page layout. Despite the glut of information, these books contain every truth of the universe (that could fit inside of one of these 410-page books). They also, however, simultaneously contain every possible version of untruth...
I'm glad I opened this thread. I haven't read the Aleph or the Zahir, but I certainly will now. So much love for his short stories.
(Edit: I emailed them and the article has been corrected.)
> a Library that contains 251,312,000 volumes of random sequences of letters (1,312,000 being the number of characters in any given book, each of which admits of twenty-five variations)
This seems to be a typo of sorts. I believe the correct number is 25^1312000 (sequence length m, n possible values for each, n^m distinct possible sequences).
Having hit this in the past, my guess is it was originally written with a superscript, then the text lost the formatting (leaving 251312000), and an editor left it as 251,312,000. Always worth checking final rendering for any text you expect to include superscripts.
It's always staggering to really meditate on the unimaginably vast size of the universe, and then come up with some simple idea such as every combination of letters arranged in books, and realize that our universe could never fit all the books that would require, even if stacked side-by-side between all the galaxies.
(The observable universe is also on the order of 10^80 meters cubed.)
Something similar happened to me once when submitting a scientific paper. The publisher merged a line number into the number I was trying to write. Caught it in the proofs, luckily.
That would be a subset of The Library of Babel. I tried searching some of my favorite lines of code here: https://libraryofbabel.info/ -- It is an interesting experience :D
Hmm, allow me to correct myself here, Borges' library may not include all the characters required for representing code in some of the programming languages we love
I was surprised by that omission as well. It is from his short story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (one of my favorites) for those who don't know the reference.
A lot of the concepts that Borges writes about have always struck me as relevant to computer science, and Tlön, Uqbar is no exception. For example, identity vs. equality when comparing things:
> They said that the heresiarch was prompted only by the blasphemous intention of attributing the divine category of being to some simple coins and that at times he negated plurality and at other times did not. They argued: if equality implies identity, one would also have to admit that the nine coins are one.
And this bit always makes me think of reference counting and garbage collection:
> Things became duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.
Enjoyed reading the Library of Babel, referred in this article. Other Borges masterpieces - The Lottery in Babylon, Blue Tigers, The House of Asterion.
20 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 57.7 ms ] threadThe Aleph - A point in space through which the whole universe can be seen and comprehended.
The Zahir - An object that has the power to create an obsession in everyone who sees it, the obsession so strong that after a short period of time everything else disappears.
The A and The Z. Infinity and Zero.
It's not immediately obvious the Zahir is a 'math concept'.
"mildly racist and misogynist,"
Maybe by our standards. Quite the opposite by his era.
"made apologies for brutal dictatorships." As did most Argentines when the bastards took over in the late 70s.
"kinda of a coward" From what I hear like most Argentines who turned a blind eye. The Dirty War had few heroes.
"...apparently forgotten fact that you can separate the work from the person."
Agreed! I just don't think that we should be so harsh on Borges, already blind, old man during the dictatorship.How few among us have suffered the infamies that Borges suffered?
By the way I dont think he was a bad man for hating Peron, that does not bother me at all.
That's the type of trite literary gossip that seldom has anything to do with a man (even if it's true) and their real character.
Given access to thousands of pages of your writings and hundreds of interviews, plus several biographies with contributions from people you've known, people could say most of the same things for you.
Especially if you were born in 1899, and weren't tell in advance the correct 2019-aligned ideologies to support.
>This only shows the apparently forgotten fact that you can separate the work from the person.
I'd separate some inconsequential opinions and diversions from the current mainstream from the person as well. Half of the "high society" in the US in 1930 were in favor of Hitler for example.
And almost all of the "high society" in the South were in favor of slavery or quite racist well after the Civil War...
Yet they could otherwise be very fine people, loyal to their friends, helpful when needed, charitable, and all that...
People can't be judged summarily, nor outside of their times...
In "Undr," the poetry of a society evolves over time to be just a single word that contains all of the meaning and feeling of the poetry that had previously existed in the culture. In this sense, the word is a singularity of meaning that encompasses everything that it aims to. It is superior to less compact representations.
In "The Library of Babel," there is a (near) endless library full of 410-page books that contain every permutation of a standard set of letters on a standard page layout. Despite the glut of information, these books contain every truth of the universe (that could fit inside of one of these 410-page books). They also, however, simultaneously contain every possible version of untruth...
I'm glad I opened this thread. I haven't read the Aleph or the Zahir, but I certainly will now. So much love for his short stories.
> a Library that contains 251,312,000 volumes of random sequences of letters (1,312,000 being the number of characters in any given book, each of which admits of twenty-five variations)
This seems to be a typo of sorts. I believe the correct number is 25^1312000 (sequence length m, n possible values for each, n^m distinct possible sequences).
Having hit this in the past, my guess is it was originally written with a superscript, then the text lost the formatting (leaving 251312000), and an editor left it as 251,312,000. Always worth checking final rendering for any text you expect to include superscripts.
>"... each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color."
>"The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number."
25 ^ ( 410 * 40 * 80 ) = 25^1312000 ≈ 10^1834097 possible books.
There are an estimated 10^80 atoms in the known universe.
(The observable universe is also on the order of 10^80 meters cubed.)
https://tlon-uqbar-orbis-tertius.fandom.com/
His work is "inherently hyperlinked" so i thought the format may suit it well...
"Los espejos y la cópula son abominables porque multiplican el número de los hombres"
(mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the number of people)
A lot of the concepts that Borges writes about have always struck me as relevant to computer science, and Tlön, Uqbar is no exception. For example, identity vs. equality when comparing things:
> They said that the heresiarch was prompted only by the blasphemous intention of attributing the divine category of being to some simple coins and that at times he negated plurality and at other times did not. They argued: if equality implies identity, one would also have to admit that the nine coins are one.
And this bit always makes me think of reference counting and garbage collection:
> Things became duplicated in Tlön; they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.
Borges expands on this idea in the separate (very) short story The Book of Sand.