Plot summary

The titular "Book of Sand" is the Book of all Books, and is a monster. The story tells how this
book came into the possession of a fictional version of Borges himself, and of how he ultimately
disposed of it.

On opening the book, Borges finds that the pages are written in an indecipherable script
appearing in double columns, ordered in versicle as in a Bible. When he opens to a page with an
illustration, the bookseller advises a close look, since the page will never be found, or seen, again.
It proves impossible to find the first or last page. This Book of Sand has no beginning or end: its
pages are infinite. Each page is numbered, apparently uniquely but in no discernible pattern.

The bookseller indicates that he acquired the book in exchange for a handful of rupees and a
Bible, from an owner who did not know how to read. His conscience is clear with respect to that
transaction: he feels sure of not having cheated the native in exchanging the Word of God for this
diabolical trinket. He and the fictive Borges strike a bargain, and Borges exchanges his entire
pension plus a black-letter Wyclif Bible for the miraculous book.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume is mentioned, and the poet George Herbert is referenced
via the epigraph, "Thy rope of sands."

It can be by no means accidental that Borges (the author, not the character) has placed into the
hands of an evangelical Presbyterian an "immediate object," the sense of which seemingly
undermines plain faith in a Christian eschatology.

One imagines that to the Presbyterian Bible salesman, God's truth is a simple truth. This simple
religion was by no means shared by the philosopher Hume, who, according to James Boswell ,
although the son of Presbyterians, "...owned [that] he had never read the New Testament with
attention...[and] had been at no pains to enquire into the truth of religion, and had continually
turned his mind the other way"[1] (Boswell, p. 409). According to Hume,

... evidence ... for the truth of the Christian religion is less than the evidence for the truth of our
senses; because, even in the first authors of our religion [whose texts are founded on the
testimony of the apostles], it was no greater; and it is evident it must diminish in passing from
them to their disciples; nor can any one rest such confidence in their testimony, as in the
immediate object of their senses.[2]

Borges underscores the distance between the bookseller and Hume by having his fictive persona
express his "great personal affection for Scotland, through my love of Stevenson and Hume." The
salesman "corrects" him, adding, "And Robbie Burns."

The worldly Borges ultimately proves no more able to live with the terrifying book than was the
salesman. He considers destroying the book by fire, but decides against this after reasoning that
such a fire would release infinite amounts of smoke, and asphyxiate the entire world.

Ultimately, Borges transports the book to the Argentine National Library (of which the real
Borges was, for many years, the head). "Slipping past a member of the staff and trying not to
notice at what height or distance from the door ... [he loses] the Book of Sand on one of the
basement's musty shelves", the infinite book deliberately lost in a near-infinity of books
The curious infinite of Jorge Luis Borges

Can we use an EBook reader to read an infinite book? What if we load The Book of Sand to an e-
reader? Can we flip infinite pages in any of those devices? Can we compact into an digital book
the infinite book that Borges had in his hands.

Previous to the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, (1899-1986) many writers, philosophers, and
mathematicians played with the language trying to analyze and decipher the infinite.

In The Book of Sand, a translation from the Spanish original El Libro de Arena, Borges shows us
an unexpected view of his understanding of the infinitude.

In this short story that bears the same as the title of the book, Borges —the character— is visited
by a Bible salesman that after a brief introduction offers him a special book: "I don't only sell
Bibles. I can show you a holy book I came across on the outskirts of Bikaner. It may interest
you."

What kind of book can a Bible salesman offer Borges —the writer— that can capture his
attention? Borges —a professor of English literature— and librarian with a huge collection of
books of his property was accustomed to see every kind of book. So, what was so interesting in a
book that on it's spine the title was the simple phrase: Holy Writ - Bombay?

Borges opened the book at random just to find that the pages were worn, and in a unintelligible
tightly printed text with poor typography. But this was not a surprise for him, the true surprise
was in the numbering of the pages.

I noticed the one left-hand page bore the number (let us say) 40514 and the facing right-hand
page 999.

Was this a misprint? Was it a typographical error? There was only one way of finding the truth:
look for the numbering in other pages. And that he did, but "I turned the leaf; it was numbered
with eight digits". What should we expect after the number 999? The number 1,000; but an eight
digits number is greater that 9,999,999; so the "error" persisted. In fact, no book on the earth is so
big, so the first conclusion that comes to our mind is that from the very beginning of the book
there was no intention in numbering it correctly.
He told me his book was called the Book of Sand, because neither the book nor the sand has any
beginning or end.

We can reproduce this unordered numbering with any book from a bookcase: choose a book,
erase or overwrite all the page numbers and substitute each one with a random one, no matter
how big or small.

But there was an additional attribute of The Book of Sand that we cannot do with any book from
any bookstand, bookshelf, or library: you see each page only once. This happened to Borges with
one of the illustrations of the book:

It was at this point that the stranger said: "Look at the illustration closely. You will never see it
again."

Borges' metaphor of choosing the sand to convey the idea of non-repeating events is perfect. Go
to the beach —any sandbox is useful for our example— take a handful of sand, drop all of the
grains and keep only one in your hands; the sentence applies perfectly: look at it closely because
you will never see it again.

The book was so mysterious and weird that it even lacked a first page, not because there was no
number 1 in the first page, but because in some inexplicably, or magical, puzzling and perplexing
way there appeared more and more pages between the book cover and the "first page".

The stranger asked me to find the first page.

I laid my left hand on the cover and, trying to put my thumb on the flyleaf, I opened the book. It
was useless. Every time I tried, a number of pages came between the cover and my thumb. It was
as it they kept growing from the book.

Trying to find the last page of the book was equally frustrating for Borges as baffling can turn to
be for us to find the first and the last grain of sand on a beach.

Now find the last page.

Again I failed. In a voice that was not mine I barely managed to stammer: "This can't be".

A book with no first and last page is nothing more nor less than an infinite book. That was The
Book of Sand: an infinite book. Somehow, the book was infinite in pages, but not infinite in
weight, nor in volume. The book was not infinitely big, it was an ordinary book, but with the
particularity that its pages were constantly appearing and disappearing, new pages substituting
existing ones.

The strange salesman that visited Borges was aware of his astonishment with the bizarre book he
was holding in his hands: the same thing happened to him —that's the reason why he called it a
"devilish book". Thus, ceremoniously he told Borges:

If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in
time.
Borges' concept of infinitude is different

In mathematics, we usually associate the infinite with the sequence of the natural numbers: 1, 2, 3
... We say that the natural numbers are infinite because they don't ever end. To every number no
matter how big it is, we can always add 1 to find a bigger number. Thus, there is no way of
reaching a limit, of reaching an end, of finding the last natural number. The natural numbers are
the best example of the most elementary idea of infinitude. But the sequence of natural numbers
is far from Borges' idea of what is the infinite: we already saw that the Book of Sand had no first
page; it had no page 1.

But equally important as not having a first page is the fact that the book's page numbering
followed no ordered sequence; any number can follow any other number at any moment. The
page numbers were random at its purest stage.

If as he says , when he first opened the book he saw the page number 40514 followed by the page
number 999, at some other time the same number 40514 may be followed by, let's say, the
number 23089.

Can we say then that the book's numbering is just a scrambled number sequence? No, we cannot
compare the book's numbering with a scrambled number series because in this case or ordering
we always have a first number: the first number we choose for the scrambled sequence. But
Borges' book had no first page, so he is not writing about unordered sequences of natural
numbers: his metaphor is something beyond that.

Borges' Book of Sand confronts us with a different concept of infinitude: an infinite too far
beyond our mental conception, an infinite that avoids any ruling, an infinite that escapes any
possible ordering or any possible prediction. To Borges, the infinite is the kingdom where the
chaos reign; the infinite is the source of every possible finiteness.

Borges chooses a simple short story to convey his idea of the infinitude because for him the
infinite is not only unreachable, but any part of it is also inconceivable. The simple random
numbering of a small book like the Holy Writ, that can be held in our hands is enough to take us
to the vertigo of the infinitude.

Borges and Cantor: two minds where the infiniteness meet

In mathematics there are many manipulations that can be done with the infinite; the infinitude of
the natural numbers is just the simplest of them. One the many breakthroughs in this field came
when the mathematician George Cantor (1845-1918) introduced a more complex notion of
infinitude with what he called the transfinite numbers which is an infinite class of infinites. For
Cantor, there is a ladder of infinitudes, where the infinitude of the natural numbers is just the
simplest of all the infinites. For him, this ladder of ever-growing infinites has no end. To this
obscure but interesting field of mathematics belongs the abstract field called transfinite
arithmetic.

Borges had a literary mind with deep interests in mathematics; that's the reason why he exposes
so excellently —and in a very short story— how the infinite is beyond our comprehension. On
the other hand, Cantor was the pure mathematician that worked on the abstract concepts of the
theory and cardinality of sets. From there he discovered that the infinites are infinites in
themselves.
The first of the "infinitude of infinites" discovered by Cantor is the one called the Aleph. From
there he also introduced the so-called the Continuum. The connection I try to establish between
Borges and Cantor is that in The Book of Sand we can begin to understand what is the
Continuum without recurring to deep mathematics.

Imagine that you open that "devilish book" and by some unknown power you can write the
sequence of the page numbering as it appears page by page. Now close the book and reopen it
again and repeat the process again and again. You will "finally" obtain all possible orderings of
the natural numbers. I cannot show it here, but it is possible to prove, that your "list" of all
possible orderings of the natural numbers is not countable, not even infinitely countable.

Thus opening an closing The Book of Sand is an act of delving into the Mathematical
continuum.