We’ve all met that pretentious English major at a party. You know exactly the one I’m talking about; the one that gives the rest of us English majors a bad name. Somehow they always find a way to turn every conversation into a critique of literature saying that “everything worth reading has already been written”. If you’re anything like me, you just nod politely, silently hoping that they stop talking.

But what if I told you, they’re right!...Okay, so maybe not quite yet but they’re working on it.

There is a website called The Library of Babel, where these really smart people worked on expanding and researching a pre-existing theory. Basically, they have found a way to generate every possible combination of letters both lowercase and capital, as well as spaces, periods and commas. That is a lot of possibilities to generate. According to their “about” section, their library currently contains all combinations of 3,200 characters, which equals 10^4677 books.

So what does that mean for us?

When my boyfriend first stumbled across this website, he was so excited to tell me. He assumed that I would be ecstatic to hear that all of this information was right at the tip of my fingers. My initial reaction was wow, that’s pretty neat; it must have taken a lot of work to generate a formula that could calculate information like that. Then it sort of bummed me out when he said, “how weird is it that everything that has ever been written, or ever will be written exists in that library?”. Even though that statement is not yet true, it made me slightly disappointed.

As a person who is an avid reader and an aspiring writer, I felt limited by this, rather than an abundance of possibility. So many times I have heard people say that there is nothing new left to write, but so many times that had given me hope to be the person who writes something new. Yet, for a moment this took that away. The idea that no matter how much emotion and thought I poured into a book, a poem, a song or a post for The Odyssey, there is a possibility that this exact combination of characters exists somewhere in that library.

Would that mean that no matter how original I thought my work was, someone had thought of it first?

The answer is no. So have no fear, people who think like me. Even though the song or poem you poured your heart out into might have been generated in this library, you were the one to discover it. A computer may have generated it, but you felt it and put it into words. This is similar to the “Infinite Monkey Theorem,” which states that; given an infinite amount of time and a typewriter a monkey would eventually reproduce any given text. I have no idea if this can be scientifically proven, but I do know that if these words were strung together by a monkey at a typewriter, they would have a lot less meaning.

So my heart is back to being excited about The Library of Babel, because it is inspiration to not only be a writer, but a discoverer. It seems as though there are infinite possible combinations of characters, but only a specific few strung together could create poems as eloquent as Wordsworth or books as moving as Faulkner. So let that be your inspiration fellow writers! The Library of Babel could generate this by accident, but YOU can write it WITH purpose.