What? Why? How? Babel?
Thoughts behind the entire project.
hello! i’m Ansh Gujral - the creator of this website. think of this blog post as an extension to the ./meta page.
[Library Of Babel] since a long time has been a personal project of mine. it started as a git repository merely to store links and articles for me to read later. overtime, it has evolved into what you see now - a personal blog, a curation, all sounding very formal library-esque.
first off, why the name [Library of Babel]? the inspiration behind the name came from a short story The Library of Babel by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. quoting Wikipedia,
Borges’ narrator describes how his universe consists of an enormous expanse of adjacent hexagonal rooms. In each room, there is an entrance on one wall, the bare necessities for human survival on another wall, and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books are random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just 25 basic characters (22 letters, the period, the comma, and space). Though the vast majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages.
libraryofbabel.xyz is a similar ambition, the desire to curate endless knowledge. as i’ve wrote on the main page, it is a monument to human ambition. a testament to insatiable hunger of the human mind.
it is also intended to be a host of all my write-ups both technical and non-technical. going by the theme set for the website, that page is rightfully named publications. the curation can be found on the page library.
more or less, that ends my monolouge.
i hope you enjoy your stay here.
good night, and good luck.