The angel Metatron was charged with cataloging the Library of Babel. He took a look, climbing out into a 4th spatial dimension to get his bearings. In eternity there were still remnants of the great War (that having been in eternity somewhere it still goes on), and a smoky residue whisper drifted by saying, “Set it all under ‘fire’.” It was not helpful. Metatron did wonder for a moment how Lucifer might have done it. No matter. He thought of how fast he could flip through all the pages if he made his hand androidfunction and spin off a minor eternity in that process. Which really didn’t help either. What does one do with infinite sets? Did the Architect lecture about this once? Perhaps he had thought that that subject was so obscure as to be only useful in the most corner of cases. Which of course now would be that. He searched his memory, and there he remembered with perfect angel knowledge that the topic had been infinite sets of metaphors. Was he looking at the problem wrong?
Was it really dividing information into subsets that have some meaning in common? Except that to statically divide and conquer will be at some point, reducio ad arbitrarium. It would need to be dynamic, if it could not be absolutely objective. Then, he had it: make the Library self-aware, so the texts could read each other. Then you would have all the books in two main varieties: one with all words and grammar spelling out sensible things, and then the other would be in different degrees of derangement. There would be exceptions to that division, of course, but if the awareness were a natural one, the exceptions (the mad genius ones)—they should translate just fine. So, imagine a symphony in n dimensions, where organization is the music: they arranged themselves under books that categorized them, for these must exist, then recoalesce in other categorizations based on commmon affinities that they shared, and networks of all possible organization schemes begin to form, to spin that process out into infinity. There. And so the job was done. In one eternal hour, not bad for a day’s work.
One might imagine that even the deranged books worked something out of that kind of arrangement, though one might think only Cthulhu or his minions would benefit from their organization.
