I will conclude my series on “David Hume in the Library of Babel” by returning to to the question I posed in my previous post: Why hope? Why faith? Hope/faith/belief that the decoder book or master index will one day be found or rediscovered. Hope that the incomprehensible volumes of the infinite hexagons are full of meaning. Hope that the Universal Library contains some secret sequence, that it “is unlimited but periodic.” While others are driven to suicidal despair, our narrator remains full of hope.

A potential clue to this puzzle is the concept of the “infinite.” In all, our unnamed narrator employs this word eight times. (See Borges 1998/1941, Paras. 1, 2, 7, 14, & 15.) But is the Library really “infinite”? And if not, where are its outer limits? Alas, The Library of Babel is full of contradictions. On the one hand, we are told in the first and last paragraphs of the story that the Universal Library “is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries” and that it is “unlimited.” But at the same, we are also told in the middle of the story that the total number of tomes, though astronomically large, is not infinite: “the Library is ‘total’—perfect, complete, and whole—and … its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite) ….” How can an infinite Library not contain an infinite number of books? Or, what about our Universe? Is the Universe infinite? Alas, scientists still don’t have a definitive answer, for while the observable universe is finite, with a radius of about 46 billion light-years, the total universe could be larger, potentially infinite.

Perhaps there are some things we cannot assign a Humean probability value to, such as the infinite or the impossible. Consider once again the possibility of a decoder book or master index. If such a literary holy grail were to exist, will it ever be found? Or to put this question in Humean terms (cf. Hume 1748), is the probability p₁ of locating the Universal Library’s master index higher or lower than the probability p₂ that any of the miracles reported in the New Testament Gospels of the Bible really happened? Alas, given the astronomical size of the Universal Library and the historical distance between our day and Biblical times, how would we even begin to quantify such probability values? So, what is to be done? What happens when we cannot assign probability values to carry out Hume’s probabilistic test?

What if the decision to believe in God—or in any other impossibility or improbable possibility, I might add—is not so much a belief but a lifestyle: “a choice founded not on evidence but on the way we choose to live in the face of inadequate evidence.” (Tanya Luhrman, When God Talks Back, p. xiv) In other words, what if we turn Hume’s argument against miracles—and religious skepticism more generally—on its head? Or to quote Tanya Luhrman again: “If you could believe in God, why wouldn’t you?” (Ibid., p. xvi)

On this Luhrmannian view of Borges’ Library of Babel, our narrator has “out-Humed” David Hume. Despite the lack of any direct evidence that the randomly-arranged and composed books in the Universal Library have any meaning, the narrator still holds out hope that those incomprehensible and indecipherable volumes are susceptible to cryptographic methods or allegorical readings. How could it be otherwise, for without this hope, where would we find the requisite curiosity and motivation to make sense of the impossible?