Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm

»The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz himself, before Swift, gave up atoms and modularity. Even he could not believe the computations he knew how to make. For he argued against Newton’s corpuscles that if indeed the world were modular, some repetition must logically occur, and no one—not even a diligent friend of his who searched a whole afternoon over the lawn of a German princess—had ever found two blades of grass which were absolutely identical. He was logically correct, but absurd before the combinatorial facts. ‘The palace lawn was worlds too small. The storyteller Jorge Luis Borges alone among imaginative writers has fully grasped the paradox in his Library of Babylon, a universe filled to the ends of space with random books, which house men still lost for want of meaning. The parable is as keen for us as was Lagado for the Royal Society, but it is more soundly reasoned. The world is modular, yet it never repeats, nor does it supply meaning randomly. The possibility of the typewriting apes and the script of Hamlet is no more than an arithmetical joke, a game with logic.« [from the foreword]