What is your favorite quote of all time? What gives it that status?
Being satisfied with my response, I decided to ask her, “So what’s your favorite quote?”
Harper wasted no time in considering her answer. “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”
“Huh. What’s that from?”
“The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. It’s about an infinite library of hexes that contains every possible combination of letters on 410-page books.”
“It wouldn’t be infinite, then.”
“Practically it would be.” Harper looked down at the ground for a moment and I reacted by facing my side, indifferently. We turned back at around the same time.
“It’s a wonderful idea, Max.” Her eyes grew wider. “Imagine a collection of literally every possible book. That library would have to contain all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the Feynman lectures, Beethoven’s unfinished symphony encoded into alphabetic characters, long-form solutions to the Riemann hypothesis, P equals NP, and the twin prime conjecture—every book ever written, and every book that could be written, just waiting to be discovered.”
I paused a brief moment to take that all in. “Most of it would be nonsense, wouldn’t it?” I said, “Pretty much all of it, actually.”
“Yeah and the book explores that. But the nonsense isn’t the point, Max. Everything takes up the same amount of space; there’s nothing to privilege the ‘meaningful’ from the ‘meaningless.’ English isn’t the only way to encode 26 latin characters into words.”
Harper continued nonchalantly, thoroughly ignoring my bewildered expression indicating that this was just about the most interesting rant I’ve ever listened to, “To speak is to fall into tautology. That’s another Borges quote. Words can only ever mean whatever meaning you decide to give them.”
“…So, they’re like life?” I blurted out, “Each word is an infinity of possible interpretations.”
“If you want to be platitudinal, sure.”
I frowned.
“I’m kidding.” said Harper, smiling, “And yes, each word is like an infinity, which makes the Library an infinity of infinities. It’s a tool to show just how absurd the ideas of semantics and meaning are.” Harper looked back at me with a pair of brilliant, amber eyes, presumably finished with her speech.
I carefully matched her eye contact. “It’s beautiful—er… like, the idea… I mean.”
She laughed. “Why thank you.”