The Universe is Unmoved

"If an eternal traveler should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder--which, repeated, becomes order:  the Order.  My solitude is cheered by that elegant hope."  Jorge Luis Borges in The Library of Babel

This morning I decided to heed at least part of yesterday's message and pull out my volume of Borges short stories.  I read "The Library of Babel," which is a symbolic representation of the universe and a lesson in how perspective colors everything.  Everything has only the value you assign it.  A word that might be harmful or dangerous or offensive to you, for instance, would mean nothing to someone who didn't share your perspective and language.  In the space of seven pages, he makes the above point, along with touching on humanity's inability to comprehend anything very far beyond the bounds of our existence, leading us often to worship what we don't understand.  He ends the story reassuring us that the universe is infinite and unaffected by humanity.  And this idea makes me think of one of my favorite lines from A R Ammons in his poem "Gravelly Run."

for it is not so much to know the self 

as to know it as it is known 

by galaxy and cedar cone,

as if birth had never found it

and death could never end it

Synchronicity is Scary!

“The Möbius strip, also called the twisted cylinder...is a one-sided nonorientable surface obtained by cutting a closed band into a single strip, giving one of the two ends thus produced a half twist, and then reattaching the two ends.” http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MoebiusStrip.html (I cannot believe I am citing something called mathworld, but there you have it.)

Until eleven o’clock this morning, I had never heard of a Möbius Strip. I am an English major, after all. I stumbled upon the term in a book blog, of all places, in an entry about the Borges short story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” I remember attempting unsuccessfully to read this story a few years ago. I will now be re-visiting it, as I do not like to be defeated. The blog entry I am referring to is here:  http://somanybooksblog.com/2012/02/13/who-needs-drugs-when-theres-borges/.

After my return from lunch, perusing another, completely separate book blog, I came across a review of the book, This Möbius Strip of Ifs by Mathias B Friese. I must say I find it most bizarre to have lived almost 45 years without hearing of a thing and then to run across it twice within three hours on completely separate blogs on the same day, especially given the infinite-seeming nature of the Möbius Strip itself.

What does this mean? Is the Matrix speaking to me? Will I be moving closer to nirvana (not the band, oh culturally-challenged ones) soon? Or is the message more quotidian in nature? Should I re-decorate my bathroom with Möbius Strip-themed wall paper? Should I read the book and short story reviewed? Or maybe I should just get back to work, but how boring is that, when infinity beckons?