A Light in the Darkness of Knowledge.

I was reading a collection of small works by Lewis and found this comment:

AMIS: Have you read Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz?  Have you any comments on that?

LEWIS:  I thought i was pretty good.  I only read it once; mind you, a book’s no good to me until I’ve read it to or three times–I’m going to read it again.  It was a major work, certainly.

–Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories by C.S. Lewis.  Edited, with a Preface, by Walter Hooper.  Page 89.

Read my review here.

Some of you may be wondering why I chose the blog title that I did, A Light in the Darkness of Knowledge. The title deals with what I see as the Achilles’ heel of the Information Age: to much information.

There is a short story by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges called The Library of Babel. It is about a library so large that the librarians are in despair, ready to commit suicide because of all the information contained it in. Contained in this library, there are a seemingly endless number of rooms, and each room has shelves full of books. These books appear to have every possible permutation of characters that is conceivable. This means that most of the books in the library consist of nothing but gibberish. One book would have the character ‘a’ on every page. Another book would have the character ‘a’ on every page, with the exception of the last character, which would be a ‘b.’

The nature of the library means that every great work ever written is some where on a shelf, waiting to be found. The only problem is that all the books that have little value make the good books harder to find. Borges, himself a librarian, could keenly see the problem with having to much information. It paralyzes a person, all the bad books making him numb to the good books that are hidden some where in the pile. If this is not a good description of what the Internet is, then I probably am just out of touch with reality.