Little Infinity

There are so many articles about the Kindle—about how cute it is, or convenient, or horrible. There's even an article lamenting how it's diminished cultural snobbery. And, of course, there's the long Nicholson Baker article from the New Yorker. Having read twentysomething articles about the Little White e-Book, I decided to stop reading about it.

And then I found, late, this brilliant article with this alluring title: "The Book That Contains All Books." The article is sharper than most on the subject of Kindles, talks about codices (most don't), and at the ends says something worth repeating:

Kindle 2 isn't really about what we may or may not want as readers and writers. It's about what the book wants to be. And the book wants to be itself and everything. It wants to be a vast abridgment of the universe that you can hold in your hand. It wants to be the transbook.

Ugly word "transbook" aside and whether a book actually wills to be something, Marche's comments remind me of that shining example of the short story, "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges. The eternal librarian shuffles through the book-filled hexagonal rooms, which altogether create the Library (another word for Universe), which may or may not be infinite, and all the while he fritters away the hours looking for a book that contains all books.

The "discovery" of this perfect compendium, writes the weary librarian-narrator, would be "the capital fact in history." In it there would be

Everything, the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.

There's something strangely elegant in how the imagination coincides, just even in part, with today's technology. I maintain that the librarian, should he get word of the Kindle, would jump off the side of the great honeycomb Library in the sky—or laugh. To expect a precious "silky vade mecum" all this time!—and then find a bit of plastic jammed with sequences of 0's and 1's instead. I wonder what footnote might Borges append to his story now.

(P.S. On a related note, here's an interesting interview of Umberto Eco on lists from an issue of Der Spiegel. In his thinking, even the laundry list is a "cultural achievement." So are grocery lists and menus. I guess I'm on the slow curve in life for not being a list-maker!)