The Infinite Library

by Kane X Faucher

  “Oh, you mandarin of joy!” Castellemare applauded. “I could keep you around for the mirth alone… But I suppose that wouldn’t make you necessary either, for I could just read all your jokes as they are written down in a book somewhere… haha! But then again, you could be a necessary being… If you would like to wait here, I can get you a book that proves just that, that Gimaldi is a necessary being in all possible worlds! And then you can read the subsequent and prior volumes that say you are not! O ho ho! This reminds me of a book I once read about the effect knowledge of the library has on those who hitherto had no knowledge of it! Ha! In fact, I think this exact scene is transcribed there, right down to the dialogue… But if you ask me, the Proust version is laborious, while the Bukowski edition is very pithy while also being fairly descriptive. The Proust version on cocaine is a gas to read, but the Proust version where he is doing heroin is a tedious bore! Chaucer’s recounting of our meeting is filled with amusing trilinguistic puns, and so I would highly recommend it, him being so much a writer of the European world as opposed to that myopic Shakespeare – save the Shakespeare that actually did the grand tour. Anyhow, you get the general gist.”

  “Yes, that our lives are determined insofar as everything is in a book somewhere in this infinite Library.”

  “Not determined, just that all possibility is contained therein, which is why the Library is potentially infinite.”

  “Potentially? Don’t you know?”

  “I have books that argue both sides, and others that offer alternate theories. The truth of the Library is in the books, and the truth of the books is in the Library. Hence, we cannot make any absolute declarations without making utter asses of ourselves.”

  “But we know that the Library exists,” I protested.

  “Do we?”

  I felt a migraine clawing at me, creeping up my neck and lodging at the base of my skull, slowly wrapping its tendrils around my temples. I asked to be excused, that I had some affairs to attend to in the city, and that I would be in contact soon.

  As a parting note, Castellemare said, “hopefully your Internet searches of me bore something fruitful… Oh, don’t be alarmed that I know. I assure you that I have no need to spy on anyone. It was just that this one book sort of popped into my hands, opening to a page where it was written that you were in your hotel room and curious about who I was, if I was some kind of charlatan or madman. What you will find on the web are my actions in this actual time, but nothing there will state what I do in my virtual time. In one version of time, I killed you, and in another, you killed me. In another version, we never met, and in another you were me and I was you. Farewell, and until next we chance upon each other. Oh, and before you leave, do you have those two texts I lent you?”

  I nodded.

  “Yes, regrettably, I need them back. You may have occasion to look at them again if you are not distracted by some other equally fascinating text in my Library... That is, if the Library will permit it.”

  I replaced the books on his desk, bid polite adieu to Angelo, and took my leave. The sky was dead.

  Yes, I did research Castellemare while I was in my hotel room. Perhaps I should have denied that I was snooping on him, but I was caught off guard and could only reply with the honest stutter of the guilty. But was it a bluff? Was it written down in that impressive Library, or was I being watched? I apologize: I am such a poor hand at describing events that my tale must seem like a shabby ventriloquism, a dry and ostentatious rendering of real events. However, I do hope to convey that my thoughts and impressions of Castellemare was that he was borderline insane. His manner of speech was all wrong, confused, lapsing into idioms from different ages. His laugh had that exaggerated animation and expressive trilling of someone in the midst of a very bad schizophrenic episode.

  As well, I am not at all comfortable with speaking too much about myself – at least not in the novelist's way of creating a profound and emotionally turbulent character. You who read my tale will come away with a feeling of indifference to me, an ambivalence; neither loving nor hating me, you may not even be able to summon up a faint like or dislike. I am a rather plain man in his early forties with habits and interests that stop short of interesting, and merely appear ever so slightly odd or tedious. I imagine myself and all those I have amassed in my tale to be in a narrative world of treachery and heroism with no clearly defined villains or heroes. Would that life be so convenient that it could provide us with such clear distinctions.

  The only other precedent I could find for this infinite library was indeed Jorge Luis Borges’ story, “The Library of Babel.” But that Library was not infinite - only so vast as to be practically infinite. I had the statistics in a file, culled from a research article on the subject. It was finite (and was it not a philosopher who said that we could reproduce the Library of Babel on a single piece of paper with two sides, the one with a dot, the other a dash, and that the infinite permutations of this Morse Code would reproduce all possibilities?).

  Did Borges fail to produce an actual infinite library by endowing it with calculable numbers that could be crunched and produce a result? The math of it: Hexagonal galleries (six-sided, four of these clad with books). Twenty shelves per gallery, 35 books per shelf, 700 books total per gallery. Each book was composed of 410 pages, or 16,400 lines, or 1,312,000 characters (25 in total using the 22-letter Latin alphabet, the space, period, and comma). From there, with all these numbers plain to see (it is doubtful Borges’ keen variety of thought would have troubled itself with the lowly literal state of such a library, and instead focus on the broader implications of the concept itself which is half dipped in allegory and seductively analogical) it is tamed by a permutation calculation. And there it is in full: the number of books in the supposedly infinite Library of Babel was 8.9 x 10 followed by 152 zeroes. I read in some article, lodged deep in a footnote: “if each book were a hydrogen atom, the entire collection would have a mass of 57 metric tons.” If the number of books could be calculated, then it presumably meant that the actual size of the space in which they were housed could also be calculated.

  I once asked Castellemare if the Library was infinite, and he replied in the affirmative. I asked him why he thought Borges chose not to make the Library of Babel actually infinite. His response:

  “The story would have failed since it would not give the reader hope. An infinite library has no meaning other than itself, has no reference frame by which it can be measured. In that way, it evades meaning and becomes a tautology: the Library is its own definition, its own reason. There is no preceding explanation, and thus no principle of sufficient reason will suffice! Leibniz would be aggravated by this Library.”

  So, the implications of this library were clear: there is no hope - to find meaning or ever to create anything new.

  3

  The Broken Colophon

  Tho.V. Castellmare, G.L.O.T.U.

  I spent only a few more days in Vatican City before departing. Truth be told, I was too shaken by my meeting with Castellemare to get any significant research done; and, if the theory of his library held true, then indeed all my research was at bottom insignificant. My travels were sorely uneventful after that, yet I resisted the urge to break the spell of the mundane in calling upon Castellemare. It would only be a matter of time before he contacted me with a list of chores anyhow.

  I was back in Toronto, cutting my journeys short. I had acquired some exquisite texts at an estate auction in Barcelona, but my heart wasn’t into it. The potential buyers must have noticed my preoccupied and nebulous malaise, for they employed their instinct in haggling down my list price, effectively narrowing my profit margin to a pittance. Fortunately, I did not own a store, but kept all my connections and catalogue online. Many of the books I had in virtual stock were ones that were not yet in my possession, or otherwise kept in a climate-controlled storage locker in my home town of Woodstock. Part of my business was to act as a sales conduit between owner and collector, taking my modest
commission. I mostly operated out of my small, bachelor apartment near York University, an apartment modestly and tactfully furnished with various pieces of imitation Empire furniture I had picked up on the cheap. My walls were sparsely peppered with miniature reproductions of medieval manuscripts - mostly blown up details of woodcuts from various astrological incunabula and the like, including one reproduction of Hildegaard von Bingen’s portrait where she is being infused with the word of God while her ecclesiastical assistant looks on in shock and awe upon a madness von Bingen is taking as a pure ecstasy transporting her out of space and time. I usually worked late, scouring the online auction sites for texts the sellers were listing at ridiculously low prices, obviously ignorant beasts who had no inclination of their own collection’s value. I, of course, had the entire Lincolnshire Librorum in my Rolodex memory, and could spot a good deal from an attempted gouge. It was about two in the morning when I received an email alert from a ritornello_cellophant@wz.com. In my line of work, my customers were global and had all sorts of bizarre email addresses, so I dismissed very little as being merely spam. The subject line read: “Texted!”

  Gimaldi--

  It is I, the bibliophage and thaumaturge, Castellemare de groot! I see that you are online and bidding on a few items of piddling interest. Pity, and for shame! I must confess: I am adding some spice to your bidfest, which is why you did not get that copy of the Heteronomalicon--ha! I am outbidding you for fun, for the real purpose of an auction is to be sporting among gentlemen, and I am indeed sporting AND a gentleman! I do not mean to thwart your attempts to pocket a few coppers, you see, but I do so enjoy the pizzazz of the whole affair! Bidding through a machine… who could have predicted that? I could have! In fact, according to a book in the Library, I did!

  Anyhow, my fine sir and high-minded aesthete of the book trade, I need your services to track down a particular book that - O my! - has slipped yet again from my holdings. I just can’t locate that little bugger anywhere, and if it falls into the wrong hands (i.e., any hands but these here two tappity-tapping ones!) I fear that the holder will invite all sorts of problems, lunacy, and perhaps undue commitment in one of those fine institutions where one is spoon-fed slurry and mixed medicines! The text’s name is simply Dionysus, which comprises book four of Herr Nietzsche’s later opus…You might recall that he planned on writing it, but lost his wits along with everything else so prematurely. Poor boy of Röcken! But if it comes to light, then the entire world of Nietzsche scholarship will be set on its ear – not that 99% of the world would take notice or care. However... Let’s avoid that, shall we? It is much better that this world only accesses posthumous fragments. The contents are highly sensitive, and I would urge you NOT to read them, but to remand custody of said text to my possession for reshelving. I must really be more careful with my things!

  The details follow:

  Title: Dionysus: Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence.

  Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

  Trans. By Joachim Spencer

  Publication Date: 1924

  Publisher: Charles Scribner’s Sons

  Specs: 6.02in x 8.45in, hardcover, 150lb stock paper, 180pp. Clothbound edition.

  Location: University of Toronto-St. Michael’s College. 113 St. Joseph Street, Toronto ON M5S 1J4

  You sure are lucky! It’s right nearby! Unfortunately, the next task will be much more geographically inconvenient. The details also follow below. If you wish to take this job, you will be paid quite handsomely for your time and effort, much more than your object of cheating pimply-faced brats selling dead grandpa’s rare book collection on the web for enough dosh to have a beery weekend! Thus:

  Title: Les Temps Mauvaise

  Author: Josephine Bonaparte

  Publication Date: 1808

  Publisher: Lyceum (def.)

  Specs: folio, leather over stitched boards, textured folio paper, 365pp. Missing colophon.

  Location: Universität-Gesamthochschule-Essen, Universitätsbibliothek,

  Bibliothekszentrale, Universitätsstr 9, 45141 Essen; 45117 Essen.

  Brass tacks! : Dionysus = 7500 euros; Les Temps Mauvaise = 13 500 euros.

  Don’t email back; we’ll be in touch once you’ve finished. I advise that you book your ticket for the flying contraption tonight since we are bordering on the Christmas rush of clogged airways, und so weiter. Watch out for easily annoyed librarians!

  Ciao!

  Castellemare

  “O Geoffrey, what have I done? I’ve conquered the moon, yet there is nothing left to do!” - Dominic Perstia, The Purloined Galaxy.

  ------

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  And so there it was: my first day on the job. Although all the metrics were provided, the question remained as to how I would remove these books without incident. When I was in college, I used to steal books from the library by removing the magnetic strip inserted in the spine - easier to do with some books than others; the books rebound by the library were too hard to remove unless one was so intent on the book as to slit the entire spine in search of this little strip. But how much had changed in library security since I was a student? How could I remove these books without getting caught? Just then, as if he was adjacent to my thoughts, a follow-up email:

  Gimaldi--

  Don’t be a brute about this; you are being paid a fair sum, and so PLEASE just go through the regular procedures and get an account with these libraries to borrow these books legitimately if need be. You can cover the “lost book” fine. I don’t fancy criminals under my charge unless circumstances so warrant. By the by, the book at the Toronto library surfaced in their “to be catalogued” pile, so it is already in their database - you better act fast before some undergraduate, professor (or, worse, a REAL scholar!) locates it. As for the Bonaparte text, it merely emerged within their collection without being tagged and catalogued, so you should be able to just walk out with it. It is somewhere in their dusty folio section of obscure historical atlases where hardly anyone goes, so it should be easy… but it will take you a good afternoon of searching; sorry I don’t have a more precise set of coordinates… Alas, all libraries are powered by their paralogisms…Bon chance, Dr Faust!

  Ciao

  Castellemare

  “O Geoffrey, what have I done? I’ve conquered the moon, yet there is nothing left to do!” - Dominic Perstia, The Purloined Galaxy.

  ------

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  …

  I set myself to task right away, checking the library catalogue online for the holdings of St. Michael’s College. Indeed, there it was, listed in its scant metric order, yet gleaming as a dangerous potential gaffe by the drunk at dinner. It looked as though Castellemare's information was a bit stale since the book had now been officially entered into the catalogue. I wondered how the librarians decided to include it in the collection; if what Castellemare said was true, it just magically appeared, and was not a text the Acquisitions Officer would have purchased. Perhaps they thought it was some sort of oversight and decided to shelve it rather than inquire further. The library would not be open for another six or seven hours yet. I decided to forego sleep and move forward with the plan. I booked a ticket to Essen at a usurious price.

  Hunting down books has always given my life a sense of purpose. The quarry may not appear elusive, and it has no legs upon which to scurry away, but the hunt can prove difficult nonetheless. Books have a pernicious habit of blending in and effectively disappearing altogether in their surroundings. Their means of camouflage is to nuzzle in, cover to cover, with others of their kind, and only time, luck, and a keen eye can jiggle them loose… like some obstinate, hard-to-reach tooth under the labour of an ill-equipped dentist. Although books are my life, I never have more than a hundred or two in my personal collection. Books are the means, the resources by and through which I facilitate sales and research. I love books, but not enough to keep them. As one learns from those e
ngaged in the sale of illicit substances, it is never a good idea to cut profit by using what one sells. I try not to let my love of books get the better of me, even though I am the sort predisposed to collection fetishism. And so my tendency is to create an impassable, indifferent gulf between myself and the books I am hunting, to not become too attached. Perhaps I justify this to myself with some twisted secret belief that I will one day be reunited with every book that has ever come into my possession… perhaps the only way I could make my mercenary trade in books bearable.

  I know that books carry innate mysteries and histories. Who owned them is as important as their contents, origin of publication, materials utilized to fabricate them, and edition; otherwise, books are little more than blocks of cut paper stuffed with the words of someone as fallible as any other. Without their histories, books have no content in being articles of conversational intrigue. One could indicate the exceptions in every case such as this, perhaps pointing to some vintage text that purports - or has purported on its behalf - to hold some secret, a code, a key, a portal to personal enlightenment, a means to achieve mystical intuition. Certainly, I do not deny this. However, the personal embroidery we cannot see appended to the book’s journey is, for me, a sense of its reality, its narrative vitalism in this world as a participant object. Books are a form of cultural currency in so many ways. This is why I spend so many hours studying various high end catalogues of rare books - the pedigree of prior ownership is as valuable to the book merchant in locating its true origins and in adding to its value as a soil index layer on an archaeological dig is for dating relics. There is a particular cachet among those of us who trade in books, for there are some names among the book collections that carry an indisputable weight of respect and validity. For instance, Hon. Johann V. Sturges who lived in Fairfield from 1734 to 1791 had an enviable collection of texts, each one he meticulously sought out and authenticated… Now, if I come across his name in a list of previous owners, I presumably know the text to be genuine and in good condition. Sturges was a borderline maniac when it came to the care of the book, and his methods of care and restoration antedate many of our more technical means today - and are arguably still more effective. I look around at the books produced today by the large print mills, a cheap mass production line of indifference and widespread market deluge of disposable bilge… These books of today are not built to last. Their paper will crumble and the glue that binds them will disintegrate in less than two centuries, and that is with proper care. But when editions and print runs exceed the millions, and just about anyone publishes nowadays instead of only the moneyed nobility of classical learning, the value of the book, per unit, has plummeted. All attempts to manufacture scarcity to drive value only succeeds in contrivance, and eventually the publisher relents once the sales marker is so high by pushing the pedal on production once more.