The Library of Babel Is Not Real And It Can’t Hurt Me
At the suggestion of a friend, I read a short story recently called A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck.
I generally enjoy stories about Hell. When I was in my twenties, I even wrote a short story called The White Room that was based on a dream I had of a vision of Hell. So when my friend Matt — who was one of a the very helpful early readers who gave me notes on Firebug — said he thought I might enjoy this story, I jumped right in.
A Short Stay in Hell got under my skin worse than just about any horror book I’ve ever read. It’s a metaphysical mindf*ck of a story about an afterlife with damned souls who must search a theoretical place called the Library of Babel for a book containing the story of their life.
Every book in the Library of Babel has:
410 pages per book
40 lines per page
80 characters per line
The books in the library include every possible combination of characters within those parameters (including letters, spaces, commas, and periods). Every book that has ever been written, or will ever be written, is in that library. This blog post is in there, as is the entirety of Author Asbury (my first novel), and every word of Firebug. Every conversation you’ve ever had, every possible iteration of any sentence or story, every word of any thought that’s ever gone through anyone’s mind, including the one you’re thinking right now.
The vast majority of the books are, of course, gibberish, and that’s what’s most terrifying to me about this vision of Hell — how it’s basically infinity.
The math is existentially harrowing. Let’s say you could search for your life story, as the characters in Peck’s short story are, at a rate of one book per minute.
It would take you 10 to the power of 1,834,095 years to get through the entire library.
That’s a 1 followed by 1.83 million zeroes.
The Library of Babel is so inconceivably immense that even if all of the atoms in the universe were also searching for a certain book at this rate, it wouldn’t make a dent in how long it would take. Think about how many billion trillion galaxies and plants and stars that includes, how inconceivably huge that number of atoms must be. Not a dent.
The characters in Peck’s story find themselves in this library, which is both technically finite and functionally infinite — which is somehow scarier than infinity to me, maybe because it’s the closest I can get to understanding how horrifying the concept of infinity really is.
You can search through the Library of Babel website for any text you can think of. It’s in there. Everything is.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into cosmic horror that literally gave me nightmares. If you’re in Pittsburgh, please come say hello at my book event at Bean and Things on Sunday. Till next time!
