sadqui marietta zivian
Tarja Hempton
I describe that exact concept in my book, if you're curious: A Taxonomy and Metaphysics of Mind-Uploading. I describe (and calculate) the set of all possible pixelated images, pointing out that, of course, most of them are just snow.
Awesome. I would love to make a version of this you could walk around in WebVR. Any chance you're planning on making the model file available? Really just need to break it down to the unique components (one model per unique room) and an algorithm to lay them all out. They can then be connected via portals, allowing infinite traversal.
This is how I pictured it anyway, the rooms being connected in pairs randomly, in a 3D grid like layered honeycomb. You would have to move up and down constantly, and since the connections are random, it would be very maze-like and hard to move far in any direction but up-down.
It would definitely make your voids bigger, unless you shove the spiral staircases into the voids themselves - but it seems to indicate that only one staircase is accessible from each hallway, and doesn't say which side it should be on.
Although it's a long time since I read it, I suspect it may well be buggy / impossible. For instance it's not clear to me that the library is finite, although Borges (or the protagonist) obviously thought it was (if I remember). He talks about the possibility of finding 'the catalogue' (or index, or something) in the library. But this would be multiple books, so if each book only occurs once then it is almost certainly scattered irretrievably. But perhaps each possible room occurs ... but now you need to consider each possible collection of rooms and it's obviously horribly non-finite (and the catalogue of course is also non-finite).
Since he says "also through here..." and then, "In the hallway..." it sounds like "here" is not "in the hallway", which would make it "in the room", but I Also don't know how precise the translation is.
More interestingly, I think: previously he says "A izquierda y a derecha del zaguan hay dos gabinetes minusculos." That is, the two small cabinets are on the left and right sides of the vestibule... not, as most of these renderings have it, on either side of the door to the vestibule.
...but then I also assumed it to be infinite. The text says that when someone dies that they are cast over the handrail. If the library is infinite then they fall forever. A friend and I tried to do a limit analysis of whether the air columns are therefore sparse or dense with bodies. If you're standing looking over the handrail, how likely are you to see a body fly past?
We came to the conclusion that the air column would be completely full of bodies. So much so that they would scrape on the handrails on the way past. This would cause soil to build up underneath the handrails and plants would grow there.
Well I'd like to see your math on that. But it can't be infinite because then the books would repeat. Also, I'm guessing that it would only take something less than a few hundred million floors (single digit exponent!) before the air is less "air" than "neutronium that has had all the electrons squeezed out".
If it was infinite then the mass in any direction would be equal to any other so the air (and everything else for that matter) would be effectively weightless.
As he implies normal gravity as people move around the library, I guess we can assume a finite structure that isn't excessively tall.
Some friends and I were discussing doing a library exploration game for it (but we never quite got there). Something like every page representing a star in the universe, so you have a huge library full of books and you can flip through the (99.999% blank) pages looking for one of the few pages with writing on it that represents intelligent life.
About the length of the hallways: in the original Spanish the word use to describe them is "zagun", not "pasillo". A "zagun" is a small covered space leading from the interior of a house to the exterior, like a waiting room or an entry hall. A hallway is something entirely different, but in this context the word seems hard to translate. The text is after all written by someone who has never seen a house.
Let me know if you have any questions that could be solved by the original text.
If you haven't seen it, there's an interactive implementation, which posits the "corridors" as square rooms with four doorways, and the hexagons in rows and columns intersecting them. However, it does render only a single floor, omitting air shafts, stairwells, sleep closets, and lavatories.
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below -- one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon's six sides; the height of the bookshelves, floor to ceiling, is hardly greater than the height of a normal librarian. One of the hexagon's free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another gallery, identical to the first -- identical in fact to all. To the left and right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for sleeping, upright; the other for satisfying one's physical necessities. Through this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance. In the vestibule there is a mirror, which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer from this mirror that the library is not infinite -- if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication? I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite. ... Light is provided by certain spherical fruits that bear the name "bulbs." There are two of these bulbs in each hexagon, set crosswise. The light they give is insufficient, and unceasing.
Note also that the library's books have permutations of only 25 symbols (including punctuation) "the space, the period, the comma, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet", ie a 22-letter alphabet not the 30 "letters" of modern Spanish, nor the 26 of English (see again libraryofbabel.info).
I'd suggest that "ONE of the hexagon's free sides" should read "EACH of the hexagon's free sides". Otherwise, why two free sides? While JLB is a god, given that he has corrected the text once, we can take it that he is a fallible one.
It's totally possible to give that reading to the original text. It reads "Uno permite dormir de pie". While the most straight forward reading would be of "uno" would be "one of them", it could also be read as "each one".
OK, so: If we presume "each one" and thus each hexagon adjoins exactly two vestibules, then I think we can have a structure in which the hexagons are fairly closely packed and are connected seemingly haphazardly by vestibules.
Now, with the vestibules not always aligned from one level to the next, the spiral staircases between them won't stop on every level. But that seems to be permitted, maybe even implied by the text. On average the staircase would open out onto a vestibule every three levels or so.
As a result if you look over the railing, some of the hexagons you can plainly see below you can be reached by stepping into the nearest vestibule and simply walking down the stairs to them. Some others could be reached in a similar way, but you must use the other vestibule because its staircase stops on different levels. The remainder are connected to your current location by some more complicated route. It is entirely possible that a vertically adjacent hexagon is as topologically distant from you as any other hexagon in the entire system.
Neither translation specifies which of the 4 walls are the ones with shelves on them, but it does say the rooms are identical. So there are three possibilities for where the doors go: on adjacent walls; on walls separated by 1 and 3 bookcases; or opposite each other, separated by 2 bookcases.
With adjacent walls, your only choices are a zig-zag, or tight loops of three rooms. Within a plane, once you start with one layout on a "stack" of hexagons, you have to continue that forever. There's no way to change directions without running into a conflict where a room would need to have 1 or 3 doors. However you can mix and match zig-zag and triangles within the plane, and each plane could have a different pattern of them, and could be rotated 60 from each other.
In the "101000" pattern, you end up with wider zig-zags, or closed loops of six rooms. Both patterns necessitate voids. (Maybe that's where the plumbing goes.) Again, you can't change direction within one floor, but the two styles can be mixed up.
If the rule was "every room has 2 doors, and they can go wherever", or "some rooms have 1 or 3 doors", then much more complicated patterns would be possible (spirals and such). But to me "identical" says that every room has the same number of doors in the same relation to each other.
It really doesn't feel as though any translators have tried very hard to imagine the thing described as part of their process. It might be that the original text defies realisation in one or more ways and they all give up and just try to communicate the general vibe, but without knowing Spanish I can't tell.
Your earlier text at least mentions the idea of a "bookcase", which this Hurley translation does not. Is it somehow possible Borges, or Hurley, weren't aware of what a bookcase is? Or are we to believe the "books" in this library stand as tall as a person and so need these tremendously tall shelves?
A library that "feels" like a maze, with it being possible to see an adjacent hexagon without knowing how to reach it suits the maddening atmosphere Borges seems to have intended. So perhaps the best way forward is to treat the actual description, and particularly translations of it, as a little unreliable, and focus on creating something that delivers the right "feel" even if it's not entirely faithful to some particular text.
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