Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel” is a fantastical thought exercise that essentially reflects various human reactions to abstract questions in a thoughtful and sometimes humorous way. Borges sets up the story to take place inside a library which equates to the whole world for the people living inside it. The Library contains an infinite amount of books which have a perpetually endless combinations of letters and punctuation. With this knowledge many librarians have formulated their own schools of thought and way of life to accommodate conceptualizing and dealing with their world. 

When reading the short story, I enjoyed the diversity of thought within each librarian and how that manifested in their living, or rather, coping. In the uncertainty of the Library, librarians created things like religion and a norm culture to help regulate their way of life. A group that stood out to me the most was the Purifiers, who would invade “the hexagons, showed credentials which were not always false, leafed through a volume with displeasure and condemned whole shelves” (Borges, 6). I think their response to the chaos of their world makes sense, but it almost feels rash in their need for control. The Purifiers’ line of thought mirrors plenty of people’s beliefs today, as many grapple with our chaotic world by simply trying to carve it into what their perfect world would look like. I think an example of this, relevant to today, is book banning. The act of banning books often reads as a response from adults who cannot grapple with the notion that the world is more than what they can conceptualize, so in turn, they try to control what they can to make more people similar to themselves. Borges does this reflection of our world in the Library repeatedly with different philosophies and religions, which made me love and ponder on this piece for a long time.