The King and the Library

With some trepidation, the vizier hurried to reach his king across a breathtaking pattern of gray white, gray white marble squares on the palace floor. Lately, the absolute monarch had become obsessed with mythic attributes of the Library of Alexandria. “It contains every word ever written by mankind,” he had said to the advisor, “thus, waiting to be discovered there, is the secret to gaining and keeping power, managing economies, and, possibly, living forever! The journey to the ultimate treasure crosses vast territories in lands familiar and fanciful; it demands a supply chain like those that feed a conquering army to sustain it. As the wealthiest man on Earth, I am the first to own the means to follow the clues to man’s destiny, resolving the vast collection in Alexandria–everything the species has ever known–into a single, sensible sentence. And then, instructed by this wisdom, whatever it happens to be, I will make a decree to define civilization for eons to come.”

In an earlier meeting with the Supreme Ruler, the vizier himself had devised a plan to compile and cross-reference every work in the labyrinth of scrolls and inscriptions filling a stone tower on the sands of the holy Nile, his point being to demonstrate the scheme was unattainable without appearing to say the king’s idea was ridiculous. The mechanics of it required an army of scribes and scholars working in a vast sorting bureaucracy to refine millions of ideas about the nature of humanity, and millions of versions of one idea: ruling the world. The king’s army of readers and writers required food and lodging, medical resources, and papyrus scrolls and styluses; furthermore, the greatest Hellenic philosophers needed to be lured from their home countries, often with sizable gifts and the promise of lucrative residencies, to deliberate over the work of the scores of scribes and scholars. The expense of the project would, the vizier warned the king, rival His Majesty's expenditure on the conquest of the Middle Kingdom. It could be ruinous. In fact, the vizier only detailed a plan for compiling every source of knowledge in the known world in the hope that the expense of the plan would deter the whole foolish enterprise.

The vizier could have warned the king it was futile to try and prove all of history was a prelude to his reign, but such a warning defeated its purpose: imposing a death sentence upon any who contradicted him tended to support the monarch’s simple understanding of Nature’s design. Yet, the vizier soon wished he had been more direct in discouraging the king’s desires. Putting the chief advisor’s plan into action, the king was furious with the result. He understood counsel that the use of men and resources needed to read and process every book ever written would be enormous, but increasingly he wondered if the project was not impossible no matter what was spent on it.

“You said the plan to obtain the wisdom of the library would change the lives of thousands of people while exhausting the kingdom’s food and water supplies. I didn’t care about that: it’s not as if I myself would go hungry. But, the length of the campaign exhausts the royal patience. Why did you not tell me the project would have no end in sight? ”

“I would be damnably wrong to doubt the inevitability of His Majesty’s will.”

“That would be treason.”

“But I was also wrong not to name all of the obstacles to it.”

“You may hope your omission won’t prove fatal.”

The vizier believed what lengthened the project was the natural law that commentaries and glosses on the original texts in a library begat more information–more texts!--rather than refining and compressing the experience of past generations. To name one difficulty, the context in which a historian or poet writes dissipates so quickly, later generations can never feel what words from the past signify. All we can do is choose between various approximations. Measurements of space or number are easily communicated, but we only have words to explain the words of brilliant thinkers of the past, references and allusions implying other words.

“In one of the versions of The Odyssey,” said the vizier, “Odysseus’ crew asks him to describe the sirens’ song. ‘To do that,’ the captain said, ‘I would have to write a whole other song.’”

Like others who have a pet belief they can’t relinquish no matter how definitively it is contradicted, the king was intent that more information was the anecdote to human ignorance. If every record of mankind’s history were laid before him, he was certain the pattern of history would be visible. He would gladly bankrupt his kingdom if it were the only means to gather enough factual data to resolve the meaning of life, by which he meant his own. The chief advisor saw no benefit to himself to tell the king, no matter how he harasses and harangues them, facts never yield their key; more of them is simply more.

Like the rest of us, the king was dimly aware that his majestic throne was framed by chance, not destiny. Part of him took comfort in the vizier’s assurance that whichever formula created us was not available to our senses, just in case his own industry revealed his omnipotence had nothing to do with the superiority of his being.To the vizier, the worrisome part of the king’s disposition was his eagerness to prove his majesty by commanding whole populations to perform unspeakable and self-destructive acts according to his whim. Fortunately for the lackeys and plotters who surrounded him, the monarch’s vain certainty that his was the only life on earth that mattered was the quality that made him easy to control.

“Through your generous expenditure, a pioneering sorting mechanism has demonstrated the impossibility of history resolving itself into a meaningful utterance. Or a happy ending. Establishing the truth of any statement about our honored ancestors requires its own branch of study with its own testimonials, monographs, and footnotes. Our comparisons of events become pointless analogies: we say Alpha was like Beta and describe neither.

“We have all heard it said that mastering every atom of history stored in the spirals of the Library of Alexandria would yield the key to paradise on earth: the end of war and famine, eternal life. Now we understand nothing useful is secreted away in that vault; rather, it contains a creature more grotesque than the Minotaur that dwelt in the labyrinth, a tortuous nettle of dead ends with no end in sight. Your majesty is the first king to earn the right to impose order on the unreadable scrolls spiralling in the Library of Alexandria. It tells a story without a foreseeable ending, but my king can anchor the epic’s beginning! You once vowed to learn what the tower was keeping to itself and fashion a decree from that knowledge to frame history for eons to come. Well, you have indeed learned the tower’s secret: it has none. So, make your decree accordingly.”

“Burn it to the ground!”

Or, so the tale of the burning of the store of human knowledge was told thereafter. And the Library of Alexandria became a ghostly archetype for the ruins of the past (the past is always ruined), and the books on its shelves had no other meaning than that there had once been a lot of them.

Drew Zimmerman, 2026