Borges wrote about infinite libraries. I found one once, in a barn outside Pittsboro. Every shelf — and there were shelves, proper ones, built from tobacco sticks — was full of Farmers' Almanacs going back to 1847. The old man who owned them said he was "still checking their work."

He died in 2014. His nephew sold the barn to a couple from Raleigh who turned it into a yoga studio. The almanacs went to the landfill. An infinite library, reduced to nothing, in exactly the way Borges would have predicted.

The universe, Borges told us, is a library. Most of the books are nonsense — random combinations of letters, pages of gibberish masquerading as meaning. But somewhere in that infinite collection is every truth that has ever been or will ever be spoken. The trick is finding it before someone turns it into a yoga studio.