Week Eight

"The Library is not infinite." (Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges, 79)

Wait, does he mean the HBLL? 

Perhaps not...

By the end of the first page of Library of Babel, I already felt like I was trapped here:

Which naturally made me think of this:

Tangents aside, I want to address infinity. In the first line of this short story, Borges informs the reader that "Library" equals "universe." By the transitive property, then, we could also say, "The universe is not infinite."

I wholeheartedly disagree. It isn't just because I'm a Mormon. Science tells us that there's a vast world out there. Scientists may not use the term infinite, but they know on some level that quantifying the universe is a daunting, if not impossible task. A couple of years ago, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson gave a forum address at BYU. He interwove faith and science and humor and humility. He is brilliant. Watch this video, and I imagine you'll understand.

We are in the universe and the universe is in us. The same elements that comprise my skin, my hair, my brain are the same elements that comprise the night sky, the stars, the planets. Now, I'm not a scientist, so I don't know if we are actually made up of the same elements. (I wish I had a fact-checker to look these things up for me.) But I appreciate the principle behind it: my eyes, hair, skin is made up of particles. The sun, moon, stars are also made up of particles. We are all connected and everything is infinite. 

I think of infinity and eternity often, as it is something that I simply don't understand. I like boundaries and limits. I get that because my brain is finite. But no beginning, no end? That is beyond me. I'm glad that I know that one day I can understand. Until then, I will just appreciate