Serial

http://serialpodcast.org/

Snyder, J., & Koenig, S. (2014). Serial [Radio series]. Chicago, Illinois: This American Life.

I actually listened to this podcast in its entirety with my family on our way down to Miami over winter break, it was a rather quiet 12 hours. Listening to this flow of logic from someone about what essentially boils down to one person’s life can be incredibly sobering. Its hard not to form an immediate conviction when you first start to listen and it’s even harder to lose it. You just keep subconsciously focusing on details that help prove your opinion. I would not go as far to say that the narrator does a poor job at trying to persuade me in one direction, the simple fact is that there is just such an even divide of information that I can fuel my own convictions. I feel like I have not given away anything that would spoil the podcast for anyone who has not heard it yet, but I will have to say one thing that is really to save yourself some frustration: this is an example of one of the most exasperating puzzles that exist, one without an answer.

Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

“He resolved to anticipate the vanity that awaits all the labors of mankind; he undertook a task of infinite complexity, a task futile from the outset. He dedicated his scruples and his nights “lit by midnight oil” to repeating in a foreign tongue a book that already existed.”

Borges, J. (1998). Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. In Collected Fictions (p. 95). New York, New York: Penguin Group.

We have all taken up the impossible at times, whatever the reason. Desperation, delusion, stubbornness, you only fail when you accept that what you are attempting is impossible. However, realizing that what you are doing is impossible is also the only way you can ever succeed. Accepting the impossible, is to accept inevitable defeat, but only by recognizing that what you are doing cannot be done can you take the first step to arriving at a new solution to a similar, but more possible objective. Nothing accomplished was ever actually impossible, it was simply looked at from an impossible mindset.

The Library of Babel

“Those phrases, at first apparently incoherent, are undoubtedly susceptible to cryptographic or allegorical “reading”; that reading, that justification of words’ order and existence, is itself verbal and, ex hypothesi, already contained somewhere in the Library. There is no combination of characters one can make – dhcmrlchtdj, for example – that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance.”

Borges, J. (1998). The Library of Babel. In Collected Fictions (p. 117). New York, New York: Penguin Group.

In a library that contains any combination of books, everything will be written. The Library is simply that though, just a collection of the possible, never claimed to be more or less. So what then is the significance of the Library? Yes, there has to be answers somewhere, but to what questions? Anything relevant is mixed with an unproportional amount of falsities and so one can never be certain they have found the truth. Meaning is only there because we place it there, just because we assign it does not necessarily mean it was ever there to begin with though and the same is true of the reverse. A library like the Library of Bable is useless then in the end, because it is truly a maze of lies. Answers are the needle in the haystack, but the hay is itself needles; searching in such a place can only cause you to bleed.