Spatial Design

The books the library contains could be a metaphor for those aspects of our world that we humans have always tried to make sense of: maths, sciences, biology. These can all be seen as microcosms of the universe and we have always looked to our studies to help us answer that ultimate question: why are we here? When our physical surroundings and the rules that they obey are so orderly and logical, it;s easy to believe that someone or something with some higher purpose must have created them for us. But, occasionally, a phenomenon will present itself with no logical or orderly explanation, one that doesn't adhere to the rules as we understand them. Borges describes the library itself as infinite, but explains that it must hold a finite number of books, though no one has ever seen the end of them. This is one of those such anomalies.

On another level entirely, I have to wonder if perhaps borges wrote this story to describe how it can feel to be a writer, or any artist for that matter, who sees the works he can create as finite, and, perhaps, even pre-defined. Like a bad case of writer's block, I'm sure this concept has often plagued even the most prolific of artists: how will we feel when we've reached the end, when everything that can be written has been written? If we ever thought we had any purpose before, we certainly won't then.