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What is feasible to express?
The finite nature of words is indicated by Borges in The Library of Babel, included in Ficciones. Inside its books, there are “leagues of senseless cacophonies, of verbal medleys and incoherencies”, because its “shelves register all the possible combinations of twenty five orthographic symbols (number, though enormous, not infinite), or anything that is feasible to express”. The idea of a space that encloses all the possible combinations of words –all the speeches?- is also in the dictionary: as a book that includes all the words, it contains in a potential way the totally of texts; somehow, all the allowed books are already there, waiting for the combinations that will make them possible.
The finite nature of words is indicated by Borges in The Library of Babel, included in Ficciones. Inside its books, there are “leagues of senseless cacophonies, of verbal medleys and incoherencies”, because its “shelves register all the possible combinations of twenty five orthographic symbols (number, though enormous, not infinite), or anything that is feasible to express”. The idea of a space that encloses all the possible combinations of words –all the speeches?- is also in the dictionary: as a book that includes all the words, it contains in a potential way the totally of texts; somehow, all the allowed books are already there, waiting for the combinations that will make them possible.