An Image of Infinity

While confronting the multiplicity and seemingly endless amount of information available in the internet I had a flashback of the moment when as a teenager I read, many years ago, a passage from the novel Of Time and the River, by Thomas Wolfe, a writer particularly sensitive to chaotic proliferation and the vastness and variety of reality. In his prolific vehement prose Wolfe communicates the overwhelming feeling of limitation a person feels in front of life’s plurality. Particularly poignant and of interest to those of us who feel the awe of infinity in front of the computer screen is the passage in the novel in which the young character feels a similar sense of limitation among the innumerable books in stacks of the university library.

"Now he would prowl the stacks of the library at night, pulling books out of a thousand shelves and reading in them like a madman. The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know--the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be. . . Yet this terrific orgy of the books brought him no comfort, peace, or wisdom of the mind and heart. Instead, his fury and dispair increased from what they fed upon, his hunger mounted with the food it ate."

Thomas Wolfe. Of Time and the River (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935) 91