Baccalaureate

Congratulations to the class 2012. Tonight is a night for all of us to celebrate your

accomplishments and it is kind of you to indulge us so patiently. I’m grateful that 

you have asked me to speak to you tonight; I have so much to say to you. But I will

be kind and not take advantage of your patience too much. I have been one of your

class advisors for four years now, but I have had shockingly little opportunity to give

you advice.

In truth, I’m not entirely sure that what I have to say to you tonight constitutes

advice but you can only speak what is in your mind and these ideas have been stuck 

in my head for most of this last semester.

It started because of a short story that I read by an Argentine writer named Jorge

Luis Borges. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that reading isn’t dangerous. It was first 

published in 1941 as a part of a collection of stories that have together caused me

some serious sanity loss. I thought I would share some of that with you tonight. :)

The story takes place in a library, filled with rooms and bookshelves that appear to

extend forever in all directions. Each book is the same in that they have 410 pages

of the same size type consisting only of the lowercase letters of the alphabet,

periods, commas, and spaces. Each book is different in that no two books have

exactly the same arrangement of letters, spaces, and punctuation, much like an

ordinary library. This library however, contains every possible configuration of 

letters, spaces, and punctuation that can fit into those 410 pages.

There are a finite number of possible books in the Library of Babel, but I had to

invoke the use of logarithms in order to put that number into scientific notation;

definitely the first sign that your sanity is slipping. I will only say that if each book 

were the size of an atom, you could not fit all of these books into the observable

universe. Not even close.

Though the Library of Babel is fictional, it presents a multitude of inescapably real

consequences. In fact, in this digital age, I could go home and create a perfect 

simulation of this Library, put it up on the internet, and anyone in the world could

take a virtual walk through it and read as many books as they like. I’m not a

particularly skilled programmer so it would probably take me all summer to

complete the task, but it would be madness, an act of genuine evil, to do such a thing.

But lets pretend that I have done so, just to make the rest of what I have to say,

easier to imagine.

 

 

Though most of the books in this library would be mostly gibberish, somewhere on

those shelves… 

There is a book that is nothing but the letter “a” repeated 1,312,000 times. 

There is a book that is the word “monkey” repeated 187,000 times.

Your calculus textbook is there.

There is a copy of MacBeth written in Pig Latin.

Everything that is possible to put in writing is there.

There is book that is your entire life story. Don’t worry if your story takes

more than 410 pages, the first volume will be here and the second volume a few

trillion light year over there. Over here is the Spark Notes version anyway. Here is

your life story in Iambic Pentameter, over there is another that is so slanderously

inaccurate that you wish there was an author to sue.

As Borges himself describes it:

“All that is able to be expressed in every language. All the detailed History of 

the future, the autobiographies of archangels…” is there... somewhere.

< I could go on and on about the implications… I guess that’s the point, and I guess

that’s why its driving me quite mad. But , instead, I’ll just point out one more thing.

How would you know whether to read any particular book front to back or back to

front, or whether it should be read left to right, or right to left? >

Here’s the real point of the story:

There is no intended meaning in any of these books. Meaning does not come from a

configuration of letters, spaces, and punctuation. It can’t. 

Meaning comes from the reader.

 

Much like the letters, spaces, and punctuation of the books in the Library of Babel,

your life is a series of perceptions, memories, and imaginings. These individual

experiences make up the sum of the book that is your life.

{Like the book that contains nothing but the letter “a”, if your life contains no variety

of experience, it cannot possess any meaning.}

No one else can impose meaning on your life. Your life is made up of a configuration

of experiences, but no one can read this book except you and no one can make sense

of it but you. While you cannot walk into the Library of Babel and pick exactly the

life story that you want, you do get to figure out what they mean for you.

Maybe, when this life is over, your book gets recycled. Even logarithms can’t give

me that answer, but I prefer to imagine a whole shelf of books, perhaps a small but 

growing library that this life can be added to.

I guess my advice to you is, now that its time to get down to the real business of 

living your life, remember that this life is yours whatever meaning you wish to give

it, so try to make this one worth taking off the shelf and rereading once in a while.