/lit/ - Literature

Hesse's Siddhartha final paragraphs do something in this fashion, when Govinda see all there is to see through Siddhartha's metamorphosing face:

>He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha. He saw the face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely painfully opened mouth, the face of a dying fish, with fading eyes—he saw the face of a new-born child, red and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying—he saw the face of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into the body of another person—he saw, in the same second, this criminal in bondage, kneeling and his head being chopped off by the executioner with one blow of his sword—he saw the bodies of men and women, naked in positions and cramps of frenzied love—he saw corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void—he saw the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elephants, of bulls, of birds—he saw gods, saw Krishna,
saw Agni—he saw all of these figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died, each one only transformed, was always re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between the one and the other face—
and all of these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated themselves, floated along and merged with each
other, and they were all constantly covered by something thin, without individuality of its own, but yet existing, like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was
smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha’s smiling face, which he, Govinda, in this very same moment touched
with his lips. And, Govinda saw it like this, this smile of the mask, this smile of oneness above the flowing
forms, this smile of simultaneousness above the thousand births and deaths, this smile of Siddhartha was precisely the same, was precisely of the same kind as the quiet, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps benevolent, perhaps mocking, wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha, as he had seen it himself with great respect
a hundred times. Like this, Govinda knew, the perfected ones are smiling.

In Derrida's Plato's Pharmacy, he describes a sort of auditory Aleph (pic related).

It can be argued that in Anno's End of Evangelion, the Third Impact is a way of condensing the infinitude of human experiences as a single LCL sea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQaafNForNs

(sorry for the dub, no sub version in youtube, it seems)

>>13801627
Transcendental numbers are basically this.

>>13801759
Elaborate, please. You can assume good math knowledge from me.

>>13801759

Leibniz's Monad might also fit here, though I don't know nearly enough about philosophy to be sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(philosophy)

>>13801759

That's an interesting idea, thank you, I'll look into it!

>>13801627
Oh shit this is in Mona Lisa Overdrive and I just understood it.

>>13801812

I know you are talking about Gibson's book, but that's also a great song from Matrix OST

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLeI2e2cPVw

>>13801759

No they aren't, wtf

The book of sand by Borges, the library of Babel by Borges, the Babylon lottery by Borges, arguably funes the memorious by Borges

>>13802355

Anything other than Borges, though?

>>13801759
You mean normal numbers. Transcendental numbers aren't guaranteed to have any particular string of digits in their binary/decimal/etc. expansion; you could quite easily have a transcendental number with no 9's in its decimal expansion, for instance, and so it would hardly contain everything. Granted, almost all transcendental numbers are normal anyway (with "almost all" being a technical term).
>>13801772
>>13801790
A "normal" number is one that contains every possible finite string in its (necessarily infinite) binary/decimal/whatever expansion, and does so without playing favorites (there will be as many 1's as 0's, as many 1234's as 4321's, etc.). So a normal number contains encodings of the works of Shakespeare, the Bible, etc., somewhere within its binary/decimal/whatever expansion by definition, but this is hardly interesting. Basically, it's a number that, when written out, is as random as possible; and given an infinite string of digits any finite string of any complexity will appear eventually.
>>13802304
Correct, although as stated above the other guy is correct in almost all cases. But he's still wrong and you're still right.

>>13802068

Matrix is an Aleph as well.

>>13801627
Not a great book, but it makes some play of having various locations, and one character, work as encapsulations of a city. The Central station is a nexus that represents everything, the government's building is connected to everything, then there's a character who's literally a chimera of different fantasy races.