This article by Andrew Leonard compares Google’s plans with the ultimate library in a wonderful Jorge Luis Borges short story, The Library of Babel. That library, as perhaps Google’s plans, contained everything:

“Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogues 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 commentary on 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.”

How will we handle the wealth?

People have to check out the Borges story link if only for the marvellous illustration at the top!

I was recently reading Borges because of the quote from his story “The Aleph” in deSmedt’s Singularity. The “aleph” is a point in space that contains everything and where everything can be seen at once:

I saw a sunset in Quertaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe…

(I read a dead tree copy from my local library but yes it is online, if only in the
Google cache)

The other cool thing about “The Aleph” (to wander further afield from the original topic, which I have already lost sight of) is that it also includes as a theme the narrator’s unrequited love for one Beatriz, deceased. As I’ve been reading the Lemony Snicket books lately, each of which is dedicated to Beatrice (the woman Lemony loved and still mourns for even though she married someone else and died). I’d been told that this was a reference to Dante’s Inferno. Perhaps gypsysoul can tell me if unrequited love for Beatrice is a commoner literary theme than I ever imagined!

Ummm… You’re two Beatrices UP on me.

Begging pardon, but I’ve not yet found my way into the L S books yet, but I’ll add them to my list :-).  

My American Lit student from Colombia, who happens to be an attorney but must get credentials to teach in the great state of Alabama, is ALL into Borges.  Now I understand why.  

There’s at least one Beatrice in Shakespeare (Much Ado about Nothing), but the love is REquited, not UN, so she doesn’t count.

To answer your question– no, I don’t THINK so, but I couldn’t swear to it.  (Don’t you just love the cut & dry answers of humanities types?)