The Simulacra

Over the past few months I’ve been spending a lot of time in the library, so I thought I’d write a post about the nature of ‘the library’ and what it means to me. My somewhat rose tinted view of libraries looks a bit like this, constructed through the libraries I have read about in Discworld books and Borges’ Library of Babel, which is described as follows:

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon [shelf]. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future.

A place which differs somewhat from my university library.

Still, as I sit there daydreaming I’m thinking of how many of the great thinkers whom I have taken ideas from would have spent years surrounded by similar bookshelves hacking away at the questions of the universe. Being surrounded by such vast amounts of knowledge and history instills ideals of intellectual mastery and progression in me,  but also makes me realise that even if I was to devote my life purely to learning from this day forth I’d barely even get through a shelf or two.

It humbles me as an individual; were I to write a book it would be but a drop in ocean amongst the billions of words contained on the sprawling shelves. Here in the library is the most important history of the human race, the ideas of mankind put to print and presented in their insurmountable glory; so much material yet infinitely lacking when compared with what has never been documented. Our efforts to record and explain the cosmos, the human experience, so neatly contained within a building. There’s a long way to go.