Jorge Luis Borges and the Labyrinth of Infinity
"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries." So begins "The Library of Babel," a story of only a few pages by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. It appeared in 1941 and is among the most commented stories of the twentieth century.
It has been read as science, as theology and as a joke. Borges was an agnostic, and in one story even calls metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature. Yet few modern writers has used the symbols of the esoteric traditions, the mirror, the labyrinth, the book of everything, with such mastery.
The Man Who Went Blind Among Books
Borges was born in Buenos Aires on August 24, 1899. His father's library, which held many English books, was his first world. As a teenager he lived in Switzerland and Spain, learned several languages, and returned to Argentina in 1921. In the 1950s he lost his sight, as his father had, from an inherited disease.
In 1955 he was named director of the National Library, and he later remarked on the irony of being given, at the same moment, eight hundred thousand books and the darkness. He died in Geneva on June 14, 1986.
His best-known works are the short story collections Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949). Each story is brief and dense, and often poses as an essay, a review or a historical note.
The Library of Babel
The library of the story is made of an endless succession of hexagonal rooms. Each wall has shelves, and each shelf has books of identical form: 410 pages, forty lines to a page, about eighty letters to a line. The books use only twenty-five symbols.
Therefore, the narrator reasons, the library must contain every possible combination, including every book ever written and every book that will ever be written, along with oceans of nonsense.
The inhabitants search for meaning. Some seek the book that explains all the others, a "Book-Man," a kind of god. Some destroy books they find worthless. Some despair. The narrator proposes, in the end, that the library is infinite because it is periodic: if a traveler walked forever, the same disorder would return, in the same order, and the narrator finds consolation in that elegant hope.
Borges was working with a real idea, older than the story: the combinatorial art of the medieval thinker Ramon Llull, and the kabbalistic belief that the Torah is made of letters that can be rearranged to reveal hidden names. The mathematician's question of what an infinite library would mean is also present. The story neither endorses nor rejects the mystical view. It sets the problem before us.
Mirrors and Labyrinths
Two images haunt Borges. The first is the mirror. In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1940), a heresiarch of an invented world declares that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they multiply the number of men. The line is meant to be unsettling, and it echoes Gnostic ideas that the material world is a copy, or a prison of copies. It belongs to a fictional character, not to Borges.
The second is the labyrinth. In "The Garden of Forking Paths," a Chinese scholar of an earlier age, Ts'ui Pên, writes a novel which is also a labyrinth, and the book turns out to be a vision of time that divides, at every moment, into many possible futures.
The idea has often been quoted by physicists, but Borges wrote it as a metaphor, decades before the many-worlds interpretation was proposed.
The Aleph
In "The Aleph," a narrator is led by a rival poet into a cellar, where, on a step, a small point of light holds the entire universe seen from every angle at once. The name comes from the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which in kabbalistic tradition is linked with the unity of all things. It also recalls the mathematician Georg Cantor, who used the same letter for his infinite numbers.
The narrator, overwhelmed, can only list what he sees. And then he is made to doubt: perhaps the Aleph in the cellar was a false one. Borges ends the story by leaving the reader unsure whether the vision was real. It is a mystical moment held in tension with irony.
What Borges Believed
A word of caution is useful. Borges was not an occultist. He read widely in Gnostic and kabbalistic literature, in Swedenborg and in Buddhism, and he wrote on the Kabbalah in an early essay and in the poem "The Golem."
But he treated these systems as fertile imagination. He said that he was "not a mystic," and he often presented the esoteric as an aesthetic resource, with a smile. To make him a teacher of hidden doctrine is to misread him.
Closing
Borges left a map of the infinite that has no exit, and he insisted that the map is beautiful. His stories remind us that to read is to enter a labyrinth, and that every book is a door to others.
In an age of overwhelming quantities of text, the old riddle seems newly sharp: what do we look for among so many words? Perhaps, like the librarians of Babel, we are searching for a single page that explains us. And perhaps the search, with all its wonders, is the answer.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- The Myth of Theseus: The Labyrinth and the Thread of Gnosis
- The Myth of Narcissus: The Alchemy of Reflection
- Ibn Arabi and the Bezels of Wisdom: The Ring of Adam and the Mirror of the One
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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