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🦋 Autobiography of Babel

Saramago says (approximately -- I am no Jull Costa; but with a little help from Google I can get something I think close to what he has written):

I believe that every word we pronounce, every movement and gesture,... each one and all of them together, can be understood as pieces of an unintentional autobiography, which although involuntary, or for that very reason, is no less sincere and truthful than the most thorough of stories of life written on paper. ...I propose a day, more earnestly than it might seem at first glance, when every human being would have to let his life story be written down, and that these thousands of millions of volumes, as they began to overflow the Earth, should be transported to the Moon. This would mean that the great, the enormous, the gigantic, the excessive, the vast library of human existence would have to be subdivided, at first into two parts, and then, with the passage of time, into three, into four, eventually into nine, always supposing that the eight remaining planets of the solar system would have environments hospitable enough to respect the fragility of paper. ...Like the greater portion of good ideas, this one too is unrealizable. Have patience.

posted evening of Monday, September 22nd, 2008
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