Living in Borges' Library

Where Truth Is a Lost Book and the Librarians Have Quit

Living in Borges' Library
By Carolyn Scott

Sometimes I feel like we’re living in Borges’ library—an infinite loop of distorted truths, hidden authors, and broken indexes.

If you’ve never read The Library of Babel, here’s the premise: imagine a universe composed entirely of hexagonal rooms, each one lined with books. The total library contains every possible combination of letters and punctuation. That means every truth, every lie, every half-thought, every misprint, every sacred teaching, every dangerous rumor—all of it is in there. Somewhere. Maybe.

It’s a brilliant metaphor for our current moment. A moment where we are saturated—drenched—in information, and yet seem to know less than ever. A moment where we’re all trying to “do our own research,” while the search engines whisper back tailored propaganda. Where the algorithm feeds us endless scrolls of content without authors, without context, without accountability.

It’s not just disorienting—it’s existentially exhausting.

Truth used to be something we searched for, together. Now it’s something we’re offered, prepackaged and filtered, with a pop-up ad for supplements or a trending conspiracy theory baked into the sidebar. The library has no central catalog. The indexes are broken. The librarians have quit. And most of the books scream in capital letters.

Even as a documentary filmmaker, trying to tell grounded, well-researched stories, I often find myself battling fog. What’s real? Who owns this data? Who funds the study that made the headline? We follow the footnotes, and find ghosts. We chase quotes, and find a bot.

Sometimes I think we’re not just in Borges’ library—we’re in its basement, trying to read by candlelight, while someone upstairs keeps rearranging the shelves.

But here’s the twist Borges gives us: somewhere in that infinite tangle, there is a book of truth. One that explains everything. We may never find it. But maybe what matters most is that we’re still searching—not for certainty, but for meaning.

And maybe that’s what this space—this Substack—is for. A small room in the vast library. A quiet place to reflect, rage a little, light a candle, and try, together, to read between the lines.

More soon.
Carolyn