Comment
Well, seems like any laws governing plagiarism may need to be redesign in the Library of Babel - since everything does exist already in written form, how an author can prove authorship?
There is another story of Borges, which deals with combinatorics, namely "Funes, the Memorious". Great deal of possible combinations of multiple objects can usually yield very few truly useful ones in certain context. In a way, generalization and abstraction is somewhat inevitable to make sense out of that legion of permutations.
posted by Anvar Amangoulov
December 25, 2008