I spent some time working out how directly Borges’ The Library of Babel was going to be involved in my actual script. This is a collection of, in my opinion, the most important extracts that I would like to involve in my final piece.
Come, come, come. I hope you enjoyed your time in Great British Literature from the 19th and 20th century! Everyone does; plenty of familiar names in there. What I’ve got to show you is something quite different. For all isn’t as it seems to be.
The Great Library in which we stand, some call it the universe, contains all. Every story that is, has been and will be exists within this great library for I declare that the library is endless, infinite. Though today we stand in just one of an endless number of rooms, each constructed just as this one is, with six sides and four bookcases each holding 32 books of 410 pages, each page of 40 lines each line of approximately 40 letters, standing side by side, on every side, and one on top of the other, each with a single square shaft through which one can glimpse the others, continuing on from one another endlessly, and so know the limitlessness of the great library.
There is no combination of characters one can make that the divine library has not forseen, [and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance] for the Library is total, perfect, complete and whole. [For every rational line or forth-right statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense and incoherency.] The certainty that everything has already been written, annuls us.
Clearly no one expects to discover anything. And yet, I think, therefore I am, I wonder how it is then, tell me this, if every story exists why hasn’t every tale been told?
Why is it that we know and ‘love’ and remember those stories and simply accept them as the ones we should read, without question?
What if I could tell you a story that you had never heard, for you had never sought to find it?
This is my goal, my collection, my legacy. [Methodological composition distracts me from the present condition of humanity] Here stands the works of a collector who sought the unseen stories, for, in order for a book to exist it is sufficient only that it be possible…
Yet, let me tell you this; the Library itself is infinite, that we have established, yet if every story can be written in 410 pages, each page of 40 lines each line of approximately 40 letters, those letters being only those belonging to our pre-existing, predetermined alphabet, the combination of those letters though unimaginably vast is not infinite.
Those who picture the world as unlimited forget that the possible number of books is not. Therefore, the library is unlimited, yet periodic. Travelling for the greatest length of time one would find them same volumes repeated in the same disorder which, in being so, becomes order.
[When I am dead, compassionate hands will throw me over the railing, my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which will be infinite.]
I am cheered by that. But must leave you with this and urge you to remember, it is not as it seems to be.