The Soul of a Library

everything I'm about to say has already been written written long before I started this script jorge luis borges library of Babel as every book article and poem ever written it has the script to every one of my video essays it has every diary entry you've ever written then torn up out of embarrassment it also has everything that ever will be written the best-selling novel of 2028 the acceptance speech of the next president of the United States the perfect plot analysis to death stranding to but mostly it has a near infinite amount of nonsense [Music] the rules of Moore has library are simple each room is a hexagon four walls filled with shelves each shelf holds 160 books each book is 410 pages each page has 40 lines each line has approximately 80 characters the walls that aren't filled with books open on to other galleries identical in dimension the books have a defined alphabet spaces and characters and that's it every single tone 410 pages of those characters have Hazard Li smashed together from cover to cover and the library contains every single possible book given that rule set are you getting it now starting to understand the scale of this thing a thousand monkeys smashing typewriters for a thousand years is a grain of sand on the beach that is the library of Babel and as such the library has the answers to everything that's ever been wondered and everything that hasn't one which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit 1594 was made up of the letters MC v perversely repeated from the first line to the last another very much consulted in this area is a mere labyrinth of letters but the next-to-last page says o time the [Music] somewhere in this collection is a book that tells your exact future every event that will ever happen to you for the rest of your life as a matter of fact there are millions of copies of this book each separated by just a single typo or choice of phrase there's also somewhere a perfect guide to the location in the library of the location of the book that tells your future of course there are also billions of books that will erroneously claimed to be that perfect guide and Bohr has a short story the library is all that the narrator has ever known and as far as he knows it's all that has ever existed the library exists add eternal the universe with its elegant endowment of shelves of enigmatic ivali can only be the work of a god the library of Babel is the endpoint on a sort of spectrum of libraries and on the other side we have the ones that we typically interact with in real life these libraries have computerized search systems or card catalogs or the dang Dewey Decimal System there are almost always librarians who work there but even without any people the building's themselves are designed to facilitate you finding the information you need modern libraries don't actually want to have every book ever written available that would be logistically unmanageable prohibitively expensive and maybe most important of all completely unhelpful to people who actually come to the library to learn things a big part of the upkeep a library is actually taking books out of circulation what they call weeding there's actually a hilariously apt acronym for this process must be M is for misleading or factually inaccurate U is for ugly Esper superseded by a new addition or a much better book in the last two letters RT for a trivial and why for your collection has no use for this book because they really want that musty acronym to work Public Libraries tending to their paper gardens are in a constant process of reviewing removing and preparing for future growth and this is good and necessary musty books are almost never in high demand most of them haven't been checked out for years but even still I have trouble not seeing this process as a little sad even if it's a history book that refers to America's great 48 states it's something that someone puts sincere time and effort into yeah it's probably misleading and ugly and superseded and all of that but it's also something that someone poured their heart into and I have trouble just throwing that aside there are libraries that agree with this sentiment that every single book is valuable although not all of them are real when I was a kid I thought the Library of Congress had a copy of every book ever written I didn't really care about every book but I was extremely interested in the fact that they might have the Animorphs box that was never at my local library I mean if anyone's gonna have a copy of megamorph stew in the time of dinosaurs it's gotta be the Library of Congress right oh my god it does it also has 14 million photographs 5 million Maps 72 million manuscripts and 8 million pieces of sheet music it doesn't have everything but I feel like I'd be hard-pressed to think of a single thing that I couldn't find in their collection I mean they have megamix to the Library of Congress is actually held in a series of off-site locations which makes sense but I kind of wish it was just one super structure of books and manuscripts and everything else in my mind the Library of Congress is kind of like the Dukes archives and darksouls a groaning tower of books not built to be read or understood or even accessed you don't walk into this room in dark souls you're held captive in it you're killed but unlike every other time in the game where you come back somewhere you've been before this time you wake up in a jail cell in a tower and while the key to the cell is fairly easy to get stepping out of your cell means reckoning with the colossal weight of the knowledge held here the souls games tie pretty close connection between unmitigated access to knowledge and madness in Dark Souls lore the Duke's archives was given to the dragon's teeth of the scaleless who would trade his brethren dragons and spent his life searching for immortality and he succeeded at a price somewhere along the hundreds of thousands of books locked away in the Duke's archives his mind slipped away protecting his own eternal life and his eldritch collection became the only thing that mattered so much that he turned parts of his library into a prison see isn't the only victim of his library either big hat Logan a legendary wandering sorcerer you encounter several times takes up residence in the duke's archives as you could imagine the draw of all that knowledge was impossible to resist for a scholar like him [Music] but just like Seif he couldn't handle it it's hard to know how many books he consumed before the last of his sanity left him but we do know where he ends up at the peak of a tower naked having abandoned his life's work under the weight of what he's learned blood-borne 2 is a game full of unhinged characters but no one more than me Kailash me Kailash is a scholar who locked himself away in a nightmare but it's no coincidence that your fight with him leads you in maddening loops through his dusty library in blood-borne you have a counter called insight that takes upward as he discover more about the hallucinatory world you're fighting your way through with enough insight you can perform techniques that are more or less indistinguishable from magic with enough insight you can see the monsters that cling to the spires of the city hidden in plain sight it's not hard to imagine that with enough insight you'd end up just like me Kailash cackling among his stores of knowledge screaming his supplications for more eyes to learn it is the opportunities hidden in these massive stores are irresistible a few years ago Harvard discovered that it had a copy of the destined as the LOM or destinies of the soul that was bound in human skin there's actually a name for this practice it's called anthropic Dermot biblia pudgy the book in question actually even had an inscription by the author this book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance by looking carefully you easily distinguish the pores of the skin a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman what's really chilling about this discovery is well everything it's a book covered in skin but what really gets me about it is that Harvard has had this book since the 30s did no one realize what they were holding or did someone know exactly what it was and tucked it away on a shelf regardless where it would wait nearly a century before being discovered again there have been attempts to catalog every book the most recent and maybe most promising was by that friendly face who has definitely never done anything evil Google around 2004 Google started borrowing books from libraries by the truckload one by one a person would flip through the pages of a book while some very specifically designed equipment scanned the pages they did this with 25 million books their stated goal was to scan all 129 million 860 4880 books in the world and that was in 2010 presumably there are more oh but as often happens with these enormous tech companies and they're perceived as unlimited power they didn't bother to check with laws first under the crushing weight of concerns from living authors and the inability to figure out what to do with the dead ones Google eventually shelved the effort the compendium would have to wait for another time but here's the thing it's not like they deleted those 25 million books Google has billions of perfectly scanned searchable pages of rare books and out of print ones and maybe even mega morphs - in the time of dinosaurs and they're just sitting on a hard drive somewhere James summers who wrote this fantastic article on the Atlantic described it just as I imagined like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark where these petabytes of data are just rolled into a warehouse and left there what's standing between us and a digital public library of 25 million volumes Somers asked a Google engineer answered you'd get in a lot of trouble but all you'd have to do more or less is write a single database query you'd flip some access control bits from off to on as powerful as our stories of hoarded libraries however are the tales of their destructions most famous of all is probably the Library of Alexandria a true sight that has taken on absolutely mythic status and was once home to anywhere between 40,000 and 700,000 Scrolls Alexander the Great did not found that the Library of Alexandria although he was the city's namesake he was historically not a big fan of them Alexander's Wars and quest for cultural dominance led him to do stuff like burn the massive collection of books in ancient Persepolis the foundation of the library came after Alexander's death with this guy named Ptolemy Soter and we we honestly don't know a ton about it it is absolutely more real than the duke's archives or the library of Babel but because of its hyperbolized place in history it's just as hard to fully understand I'm sure I'm not the only one who's heard that we would be living on Mars sit in space martinis with robot Butler's if only the library hadn't burned the ground Oh big news it didn't burn not really there was a time when it kind of burned but not intentionally see the thing was there were just too many ships in the harbor and Caesar was like what's the best way to get all these ships out of the harbor and obviously the answer is to burn all the ships and then some of the floating ash drifted over and landed on the library and torched some tens of thousands of Scrolls not great but the library continued to function and the other stories of Crusades by Christian fanatics or ransacking by a merton by us and his invading dudes let me just say rumors of the library's demise have been greatly exaggerated it's kind of fun to think of it as some great tragedy eons of knowledge destroyed by a straight match but things just aren't that exciting most likely it was just a casualty of the general de-emphasis of Alexandria as a world important city after it came under Roman rule there were other libraries and so having this one a store of all knowledge just wasn't that much of a priority it was destroyed eventually in one of those good-old wars between people with names like aurelion and zenobia but by then most of the scrolls had been copied or just given away in bore has a story there are cults that live within the bookshelves that sought to rid the library of all gibberish that is almost the entire library they would only preserve the books that they could comprehend and they would throw every other book into the bottomless void that exists between floors ridding themselves of the undeserving and a crusade like quest for meaning others thought the first thing to do was eliminate all worthless books they would invade the hexagons show credentials that were not always false lief disgustedly through a volume and condemn entire walls of books it is to their hygienic aesthetic rage that we lay the senseless loss of millions of volumes but as the narrator in the story muses there's no number of books they could destroy that could actually affect the library when it comes to almost infinity millions of books don't even qualify as a footnote but the reason the semi-fictional destruction of Alexandria is so magnetically tragic the reason I still get a little pang of sadness when I read about people throwing nonsense books and to avoid is that libraries are important for more than just practical day-to-day knowledge they're a way of preserving who we are and who we were and who we could be in her modern day there actually have been threats of catastrophic losses to libraries and there have been real-life heroes who stepped in to stop them in 2013 a group of men swept into the Ahmed Baba Institute in San Cori Mali a government library they grabbed a thousands of centuries old manuscripts threw them into a courtyard and torched the whole lot of them the attack was predictable at least to one man named abdel kadar Hodari he knew that al Qaeda had been sweeping through the region incinerating the written history of Mali he knew that the arson wouldn't be an isolated incident and he knew that Timbuktu is a mama Hodari library a collection of manuscripts that he fought tooth and nail to save could be next so immediately he starts buying trunks thousands of trunks every trunk in Timbuktu and then he gets metal workers to tear apart oil drums and weld them back into trunks why is he doing this because he's going to save his entire library some backstory from around 1500 to 1600 Timbuktu lived in an absolute Golden Age of writing and research scholars wrote endlessly on astronomy and medicine and law and how to have good orgasms which was seriously groundbreaking and the pages that they wrote on that work gorgeous - with way more flourishes than your average science textbook they used different colors of inks filled the margins with geometric designs occasionally even pressing the pages with goldleaf Timbuk Jews writers were using the Quran as a jumping-off point to explore basically all the mysteries of the universe in a legitimately beautiful and expansive way but as always seems to happen the Golden Age came to an end Morocco took over Timbuktu and demonstrated a willingness to destroy books that push to bibliophiles into hiding later French Sudan occupied and colonized soldiers frequently stole the manuscripts and took them home to display in museums and private collections but more damaging was the language itself French became the language taught in Timbuktu schools and as such the manuscripts which were written in Arabic became inaccessible to more and more of the population but there were people who remembered and appreciated the meaning of those pages people like Hodari and after years of convincing folks that the manuscripts were worth saving him and other collectors / librarians were able to compile a genuinely inspiring collection and then after yet another occupation this time al-qaeda they realized that the centralised nature of those libraries and made them targets to save the manuscripts they were going to have to break up the library so Hodari and volunteers invite every trunk in Timbuktu and then they start packing them and remember these aren't bound books as we think of them they're much closer to stacks of really delicate papers but Hodari and his helpers are just tetra Singh hundreds of thousands of these into the trunks and they're doing it at midnight because they knew that this was all extremely not cool with the bad guys and they also knew that if they were caught the whole plan and the manuscripts themselves would go up in smoke eventually they get everything packed up and hide our ascent one of the volunteers his nephew to Bamako with a jeep loaded with five chests the nephew gets harassed at checkpoints and thrown in jail twice along the way but eventually makes it all the way to Bamako he distributes the chests among private houses in the city people who have promised to keep them safe and secret and then he drives back and does it again and again and again he drives the 600-mile checkpoint filled around trip 30 times eventually even that trip was made impossible though and Hodari and the volunteers realized they only have one other option sending the remaining manuscripts down the Niger River you know a river made of water you ever drop a book in the bathtub you ever do that with a centuries-old manuscript 791 trunks got sent down the river paying bribes and dodging literal attack helicopters the whole time but they made it every single trunk by land and by sea made it safely to Bamako where they were kept safe by people who were willing to literally risk their lives to protect these books the first time I got to pick out a pg-13 movie for myself was at the Morris Public Library in Minnesota I was visiting my grandmother over the holidays I picked out men and black the first time I got to pick out an r-rated movie to watch for myself it was also at the Morris Public Library this time it was the matrix though I was usually only up there once a year that library has power over me I wandered the shelves when it was negative 15 degrees outside I spent hours poring over their movies I checked their collection to see if they had megamorph stew in the time of dinosaurs yes I'm still on this be a few months ago I was back in Minnesota and I went to the library and just coming out of the cold air and smelling those stacks was like being hit by a nostalgia truck I don't think I realized how much of me now was based on the time I spent in that library when I was a kid and that's just me as a dorky kid I can only imagine the meaning the self-defining that could come from a library like the ones saved in Timbuktu I understand why people would risk imprisonment and attack helicopters to save it in Bohr has a short story everyone has defined with himself by the library of course they have they literally don't know anything else but the philosophies that arise from living inside an infinite library are weirdly relatable sheer joy at the idea that all the answers for everything we're looking for have already been written down followed by the realization that the answers aren't the hard part not really it's understanding the collection wrapping your brain around the infinite amount of knowledge libraries can be intimidating exclusionary they can be musty but they are overwhelmingly beautiful and if you're lucky enough to spend time and won it will help you know yourself [Music] the library will endure illuminated solitaire infinite perfectly motionless equipped with precious volumes useless incorruptible secret my solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Jacob Geller

Views: 309,999

Keywords: Jacob Geller, Library, Video Essay, Analysis, Duke's Archives, Micolash, Library of Congress, Library of Babel, Borges, Timbuktu, Books, Reading, Librarians

Id: MjY8Fp-SCVk

Length: 26min 19sec (1579 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 10 2020