John C. Wright's Journal

I found a brief remark on Chesterton and his contrast with Borges in Volume XI of the First (or perhaps the second) Encyclopedia of Tlön, which is shelves in its proper place in the library of Babel, unless, of course, by lottery the Babylonian Company has determined the move its location. If so, and the book cannot be found, I will ask Funes, whose memory is sharper than my own, to repeat it to me.

Oh, no, my mistake. This remark comes from an article titled "The Gnostic imagination of Jorge Luis Borges" written by Robert Royal in Christianity Today.

Again and again, Chesterton writes a metaphysical story or essay to say that, should you forsake the sanity of the everyday, there is a nightmare world that awaits you behind what you mistake for the moment as liberation. Borges, though mildly troubled by the world his imagination reveals to him, has no such sharp recoil from the abyss, perhaps because he had none of Chesterton’s deep concern for the public and private welfare of human beings. Borges seems merely to say: this is the labyrinth we enter when we begin to reflect, and there is no remedy for it except to savor its intellectual vistas.

From an ongoing, perhaps infinite review:

9. The Book of Sand (El Libro de Arena)

Jorge Luis Borges tells a brief vignette of a Bible salesman, a stranger who, coming to his door, sells him a book with no beginning and no end: neither a first page can be found, nor a last, no matter how carefully it is opened. The book is written in an indecipherable language, and no pages are numbered in any sequence. There are illustrations, crude and childish, accompanying the unreadable, uncountable, useless book, but once a page is turned, they are lost in the infinity and can never be found again.

The narrator, perhaps Borges himself, reports that his obsession with this book turned him into a misanthrope. He fears the book and fears it will be stolen. He wakes from nightmares to page through it at midnight, filling up notebooks with descriptions of pages he cannot read and will never see again. He wants to burn it, but wonders if the smoke that might rise up would be infinite also, and choke the world. He decides the hide the dreaded book in the stacks of the library, and thereafter he avoids that street.

The bookseller, whose name he never learned, did not haggle. Borges traded this book of infinite nonmeaning for a first edition copy of a Wycliffe black letter Bible.

http://anagrammatically.com/2010/03/08/the-book-of-sand-el-libro-de-arena-by-borges-translated/

As with every previous Borges story I have read here, if Borges is not attempting to drive the knife into the body of modern philosophy, and twist the blade to slip it past the craggy ribs, in order to show the clear superiority of the Christian world-view, then his works perform that admirable service against his will and without his consent.

I can think of no briefer and more cutting condemnation of soulless modern materialism than a tale, only a few paragraphs long, where a man trades his solid, ancient and absurdly precious Bible (a Wycliffe, First Edition, forsooth!) for a book said to be a book of magic, which merely contains instead an endless emptiness of Lovecraftian magnificence. The magic book of modernity makes the owner mistrust his fellow man, and, too frightened to destroy it, all he can do is hide the monster and slink away.  

But suppose, the postmodern irony, there is no meaning to this story about meaningless stories. What then? Perhaps, O Reader, you can find a more insightful reading in the book of sand. Perhaps everyone who opens it will see a different page, and none of the numbers are in order, so your interpretation will never match to mine.

Here is a hypertext version of the same tale:

http://artificeeternity.com/bookofsand/

What is the point, I ask you, of making up a new science fictional idea, such as that the whole sidereal universe is merely a singularity or wormhole defect in a larger universe (hidden from our view by the event horizon known as the lightspeed boundary that seems to be 15 billion lightyears from us, and retreated at the speed of the Hubble Expansion) — if some real scientists is just going to come along and suggest, using real math and real observations, what you meant merely to be a wild speculation?

According to scientist Nikodem Poplawski, as reported in sciencemag, we may be living in a wormhole. That was my idea, and, far from being novel or original, it turns out to be actually respectable enough to appear in a peer-reviewed journal!

Here is the quote from SciFiWire: 

Per sciencemag:

According to Poplawski’s calculations, the collapse of a giant star in another universe could have created a wormhole, a space-time conduit to another universe. Between these two openings, conditions could have developed that were similar to those we associate with the big bang, and therefore our universe could have formed within the wormhole.

Such a scenario could address the quandaries about gravity and the expanding universe. If another universe existed before our own, gravity could be traced back to a point where it did unite with the nuclear forces and electromagnetism. And if our universe is now expanding toward the other end of the wormhole, this movement–rather than the elusive dark energy–could account for our expanding universe.

Well, since that idea was already stolen by Poplawski, I will just have to make up a story idea that is completely new and never been done before, such as an Invasion — a military invasion! — but from Mars! Then, when the human race is wiped out by Tripods, in a surprise ending, the only two survivors, cowering in Hodmimmur’s Wood, will be named Lif and Lifrasthir, who will turn out to be Adam and Eve! The alien world was our Earth all along! I can see dead people! Gort is the master! Rosebud is actually Luke’s Father!! And then the little rabbity guy will break his glasses and not be able to read any of the books he wanted to. Irony! 

[NOTE TO THE HUMOR IMPAIRED: I am kidding, of course. I have never had an original idea in my life, and I hope never to, since I have the same mistrust of original ideas as the Preacher in Ecclesiastes. I have heard this idea — that the boundary conditions of the visible universe form an even horizon — floating around some years ago, so it is hardly new; and I am also, despite being possessed of the ungodly arrogance which is the entrance qualification and besetting sin of writers and artists, painfully well aware that I am not Isaac Asimov or Stephen Baxter or Robert L. Forward. I am not even E.E. Doc Smith: my highest ambition is to follow in the footsteps of Maxwell Grant or World Wrecker Hamilton.]

[NOTE TO THE NOTE TO THE HUMOR IMPAIRED: That last note was not entirely serious either. Why does anyone trust what a man who makes up stories for a living has to say about his story writing?]

Part of an ongoing conversation:

“Basically, the state of mankind is advanced by the natural inclination of people to combine, trade, and cooperate to achieve greater and more difficult ends than they would be able to achieve separately… The failure or retardation of moral social advancement, therefore, can be attributed to an inability to perceive potential benefits.”

A peculiar and droll theory, but I know of no evidence to support it. The theory I hold has the advantage of being supported by common experience and the tears, sweat, and bruises, physical and emotional, of everyone who has ever had to deal with any human beings outside his immediate circle (if he is very lucky) of kith and kin — and that is that Man is a Fallen being, depraved from his birth, who thinks on evil continuously, and who will not often do what is good and right even when it is obvious and advantageous.

The idea that man is evil because he has not yet evolved sufficiently from his brutal ape ancestors has two strange drawnbacks. First, historically speaking, men are more brutal than apes, not less, (and less brutal, not more, than the Morlocks Nietzsche, the Nazis, and HG Wells speculates we will evolve to become). Second, conceptually speaking, if we were not yet come to understand goodness we would not be haunted by guilty consciences, and a sense of alienation from life and nature, any more than crying infants know their cries keep their loving mothers awake at night. Children do evil innocently, not anticipating why wrong should be wrong: grown men, even savages, know better.

On the other hand, if we once knew goodness and have now, through some cosmic disaster lost it, it would explain this sense of haunting familiarity that comes whenever we see what is good and shining and beautiful and right, and instead decide to slink away, get drunk, get stoned, whore around, gamble the money we said we’d spend on charity, and not phone mother on her birthday.

Is the retardation of civility due to a lack of perception? Really? I think a much clearer explanation of the horrors of Aztec mass sacrifice is that the Mesoamericans knew very well how horrific and ugly their acts were (for they reared ghastly and troll like idols to glorify those acts, and their portrayal of the human form was not exactly Greco-Roman in its delicacy and beauty) and that they wallowed in evil precisely because they thought the devils who ruled the blind and hideous universe would destroy them if they showed any weakness, or any loyalty to any form of goodness higher than the blood-drinking devils.

It was not due to a lack of knowledge on their part. They were a civilized and advanced society — a corrupt one, and the murderers, pirates and warriors who stalk the nomadic wilderness in shabby hide tents are paragons of purity compared to that.

I was looking up the Copts, since I planned to have them in one chapter in my next science fiction novel.

Let me quote from Fr. Adrian Fortescue, a scholar of remarkable accomplishment, who wrote one of the seminal histories of the Eastern Churches:

I thought this precis of history quite striking in its brevity and pathos: the history of these people for a millennium and a half is one of relentless persecution, relieved only during a brief Indian Summer of Imperial domination by French and British power, collapsing back into bloodshed in the recrudescence of barbarism risibly called the modern age. This was once the most civilized land in the world, the home of scholars and saints (including St. Augustine, the most influential thinker of the Middle Ages) astronomers, geometers, and mathematicians, the seat of the translators of the Septuagint.

Previously in this space, I referred to an article in the news from overseas, one receiving not much attention in the American press, of the arsons committed Christmas Eve to Coptic churches and of the brutal mass murders of the congregations by “youths” belonging to a religion not polite to mention by name, it not being Christian and therefore conceivably the source of any of the world’s ills. As would any civilized man, I expressed outrage, and wondered why the Christians living freely in the West did not bestir themselves to protect these martyrs and victims of ruthless persecution by the Mohammedans.

One angry and astonished reader wrote in to comment that I was being paranoid: what evidence did I have (he demanded condescendingly) that the Mohammedans were doing as their religion commands, and making holy war on the Christians? Surely they were attacking all and sundry, so why should Christians be picked out for my special sympathy?

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