Somewhere in a word document titled “Krea Campus Dynamics”, I exist as participant X, with a note saying, “displays mild tendencies of existential thinking that his friend group doesn’t really like”. I don’t think I’ve met the researcher (If I have, then HELLO!) but I know that they’ve seen me during my endless Narsis runs and countless conversations with my friends, I suspect my love for Diet Coke has been forever archived in some Excel sheet under “performative male behaviour.” They’re probably right. It reminds me of Borges’ Library of Babel—a place where every possible book, every sentence ever written or imagined, already exists.
I feel my campus is in more ways than one, a replica of the Library of Babel. Each corridor leads to a new genre of books. The Economics class speaks in data and graphs, the philosophy students ponder endless riddles and the math students spit out mathematical abstractions. Every idea is a footnote to someone else’s academic dissertation. Somewhere, someone is observing all this, making note and typing rather aggressively about “youth microcultures in semi-urban institutions.” We, the studied, continue sipping our coffees, hogging our chicken puffs, unaware that our laughter has already been archived.
Something that a year in Krea has taught me is that, being in a university, you often mistake your life to be data points. These then become entry points for analysis. Skipping breakfast? Late-stage capitalism. Changing your major? Identity crisis under neoliberalism. Falling in love? Cross-disciplinary collaboration. I once overheard a couple talking about how ghosting can be considered as “performative silence” and if I’m being honest, they made some pretty strong points. College – for the most part at least – doesn’t let you live, it forces you to first categorize, theorize and then cite your findings in MLA(COUGH COUGH W.O.C. COUGH COUGH).
Even our conversations after a point become abstractions from reality. “This study explores the correlation between average size of a friend group and the total time they have made friends”. The most terrifying thing about higher education is that your heartbreak can be turned into a powerpoint presentation with a hypothesis, ideal course of action and a conclusion. Somewhere, someone is testing us for patterns of “generational post-modern detachment” and I might have helped their case by writing this sentence.
And still, there is something so beautiful about it— in writing, in being written about…an infinite loop. There’s something tender in knowing you’ve been seen, your efforts observed and your achievements recorded. The Library of Babel has every possible combination of words that could ever exist. Krea I believe is the same, smaller of course, but still the same. Infinite in meaning, yet finite in how much we can comprehend. The Wi-Fi here is terrible(the admin added new routers but worsened the signal strength?), but the metaphors are strong. You can’t walk across the OAT without stumbling into a new theory of human behavior. A group of literature majors laughing under a tree isn’t leisure, it’s a spontaneous act of resistance against academic fatigue.
But what I find to be the most tragic, is that no one ever finds the one book that explains it all. The “perfect theory of everything” is lost between the sociology department and the stacks of Indori Poha at Narsis that I have absolutely devoured. Professors keep searching, students keep annotating, and the library hums like a rather giant hard drive storing countless questions of confusion. Every now and then, a first-year wanders in and emerges three hours later, convinced they’ve “finally understood Foucault.” Give it a week. The shelves have a way of erasing certainty.
Sometimes I imagine the library after everyone’s gone, empty tables, dim lights, thousands of unread journals and academic dissertations stacked like prayers. Somewhere in there, there’s a thesis that describes me perfectly, down to the nervous biting of my nail as I read this sentence aloud maybe twice too much. And maybe that’s enough, to exist as a paragraph in someone’s infinite archive. To be misquoted, misunderstood, but most importantly…remembered
Still, I find comfort in the chaos. If I must be a character in someone’s sociology paper, let me at least have a good quote. Something they’ll highlight in yellow and misinterpret in the discussion section. Something small, but enough to survive the next draft of the universe.
After all, in the Library of Babel, every paper is peer-reviewed by God.
Mine came back with one comment: “Needs more clarity.”