#49 Tues (8/9/22) - [OW] A veritable infinity of Borgesian sample lives

There are many different Borges, as I am sure he would agree. There is the old Borges who writes moody poems about being old and blind. A young Borges who writes fervent poetry about Buenos Aires. There is a Borges who writes poems about Danish swords, Persian moons, Cervantes and Ariosto. There is the Borges who writes gaucho stories and milongas, and the one who writes weird tales, and the one who plays with lost books. There is the Borges who writes only book reviews and prologues. The one who writes about imaginary beasts, folktales and the Thousand and One Nights. But also the Borges who writes learned articles about infinity, paradox and eternity. The one who is enamored of Berkeley and Schopenhauer.  The one who quotes Dante and Virgil. Or the one who loves Stevenson and Chesterton. Then there is the Borges who wrote detective fiction under the name Bustos H. Domecq. The one who was friends with Bioy Casares and Silvia Ocampo. And the one who lectured on Anglo-Saxon poetry, or metaphors, or nightmares. There seem to be an infinite number of Borges.

He once wrote:

So complex is reality, and so fragmentary and simplified is history, that an omniscient observer could write an indefinite, almost infinite, number of biographies of a man, each emphasizing different facts; we would have to read many of them before we realized that the protagonist was the same. Let us greatly simplify, and imagine that a life consists of 13,000 facts. One of the hypothetical biographies would record the series n, 22, 33 . . . ; another, the series 9, 13, q, 21 . . . ; another, the series 3, 12, 21, 30, 39. . . .

Imagine 13,000 facts about Jorge Luis Borges; it is easy to do.  Then imagine slices through this space, as he does, that select some subset of facts.  How many disparate biographies are possible?

This problem in combinatorics rapidly becomes intractable.  Let's reduce this to a toy problem of manageable size, just to get a sense of how big this space really is.

Imagine there are only 130 facts about a man, and that we want to select one tenth of the total as sufficient to create a unique biography; 13 facts, perhaps a jacket blurb. Selecting 13 unique facts from a set of 130 without repetition gives us a possible number of 

261,594,860,525,768,030

Almost 262 quadrillion possible unique biographies from a single man with only 130 facts!

Here is one:

Jorge Luis Borges was born in 1899 and lived most of his life in Buenos Aires. He was a municipal librarian for 9 years, eventually went blind, wrote poems and short stories, but never wrote a novel. He read Don Qioxote first in the Garnier translation before he read it in the original Spanish and said 'the original is unfaithful to the translation'. He had a cat named Beppo. For many years he lived at a sixth-floor Calle Maipú apartment, which he shared with his mother. Alberto Manguel and Paul Theroux both read to the blind genius in his living room. He died in 1986 and is buried in Geneva.

Only 261,594,860,525,768,029 more.

In the Myth of Er from Plato's Republic, we read the following passage:

"[T]he Interpreter ... scattered lots indifferently among them all, and each of them took up the lot which fell near him, ..., and each as he took his lot perceived the number which he had obtained. Then the Interpreter placed on the ground before them the Samples of Lives; and there were many more lives than the souls present, and they were of all sorts. 

There were lives of every animal and of man in every condition. And there were tyrannies among them, some lasting out the tyrant's life, others which broke off in the middle and came to an end in poverty and exile and beggary; and there were lives of famous men, some who were famous for their form and beauty as well as for their strength and success in games, or, again, for their birth and the qualities of their ancestors; and some who were the reverse of famous for the opposite qualities."

Each number [lot] corresponded to a life in certain particulars, of every animal and man in every condition, but there were many more possible lives than there were souls present. So, the souls then chose from the samples a life which accorded with their desires.

I suggest that each life itself is made of 'man in every condition'* and that a single life suffices to create this infinite possibility of reflection and representation. As Borges himself said in the same passage quoted above:

A history of a man's dreams is not inconceivable; another, of the organs of his body; another, of the mistakes he made; another, of all the moments when he thought about the Pyramids; another, of his dealings with the night and with the dawn. The above may seem merely fanciful, but unfortunately it is not.

Elsewhere he wrote:

In all the world, one man has been born, one man has died.

To insist otherwise is nothing more than statistics, an impossible extension.

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 * "Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave." The Lottery of Babylon.