Frankly, I read this work twice over the course of 2 days but I feel like I need to read it many more. What I took from this work is a critique of the pursuit of objectivity. What is the library? The library is their universe which is analogous to our universe. The books are analogous to our information about the natural world. The passage regarding travelers feverishly searching for their “vindication” makes me think of those in (what Borges’ argues is an effectively futile) pursuit of who they “really are” or what the meaning of their life is.

“All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure… At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future… The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man’s finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero” (5)

Borges also seems to explore religion from an Absurdist perspective. The criticism of the deep longing for a sense of belonging from a faith-based perspective reminds me a lot of Camus and his criticism of those who believe that the universe has an ultimate meaning:

“Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified. The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library and that the reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception” (7).

The revelation that the library exists “ab aeterno” (from an infinitely remote point of time in the past, according to Merriam-Webster) reminds me of Descartes’ revelation that the there is the mind (res cogitans) and the world outside the mind (res extensa). Both posit the universe as somewhere unattainably far away from the mind. This alienation of the human experience from reality/truth is dangerous because it rids the individual of agency, which is what I think Borges’ is trying to say when he writes “The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms” (7).

I see Borges final affirmation that the library is cyclical as a way to demonstrate how something can have infinite meanings despite surrounding one material thing. In other words, there can only be a certain amount of variations due to the 25 total characters available for use in the books, 410 pages, 40 lines per page, etc. This doesn’t mean that there can’t be an infinite number of possibilities, however, because those variations can loop around. Similarly, even if there is a definite (yet near-infinity) amount of ways one can convey they perception of reality, once near-infinity runs out it may just loop back around again.