Visiting the most big library ever

/thread

i think you should literally cast yourself into that raging fire mixing yourself with the ashes of desires and fears of all man who had the spirit to write it.

Just for future reference, the word in English is 'library,' not 'biblioteque.' Good guess, though.

as sexy as that is, better to save at least one book , THEN kill myself.

>no contact
In Search of Lost Time
>for the sake of humanity
Probably something that I have deemed important that we don't know of because it was lost at Alexandria.

implying i would read quixote if its not in spanish.

a shame i stil didnt

who said i would grab the english copy of don quixote? i mean, i may be a pleb, but at least people could just retranslate the work, though it'd probably require some other works to assist in translation, period dictionaries and references to make sense of things. like i said, there's really no good answer here, everything'd be fucked.

stop being so holistic

The book of Heraclitus since there are no other extant copies.

>tfw we will never get to snuggle up and read the book so fucking confusing that even Socrates couldn't make sense of it

but i like u

wich book? lol

i don't wanna.

The complete works of Homer and Plato. We start over with the greeks. It will be great.

I would grab a dictionairy.

Later I can just rearrange the words to rebuild the most big libary

>grab the ancient greek texts
>no one knows enough greek to translate them
>everyone thinks Soccer T's is this really weird nutcase who was a wingless chicken

there is a tale in borges fictions that talks somewhat bout this. But more eloquently than u did.

describe nutcase, im not fluent in english
>who was a wingless chicken

nutcase is someone who's crazy. someone insane, or prone to doing things that are unusual, madman, lunatic, one of those words must be familiar

i knew socrates was eccentric, but then u said something about a chicken and made me think u mistaked him for diogenes.jajaj

>how to stop a fire
>how to prevent a fire

well it was kind of a joke about how socrates called man a featherless biped and diogenes brought in a plucked chicken and cried "behold a man" or however the story goes. it makes you think, really, that a lot of the culture the philosophers created has permeated our modern life to the point that they seem something even a child would understand, and might be able to be re-expressed without needing the literature itself. but that's pretty silly talk. no one can remember anything anymore.
>how to close the barn doors after the cows get out

>an adult coloring book
>harry potter

>for me
I don't know, fuck

>for humanity
Maybe On the Origin of Species. The world could use another dose of Social Darwinism.

For myself: the Complete Works of Shakespeare

For humanity: the Works of Bach (if there is such a book)

This theoretical library would be constantly expanding to accommodate all of the new works that are written every minute; if we're saying that every single book ever written is in here we're talking a staggering number of books.

Magazines, newspapers, scientific journals, children's books, even fucking guides for video games. That's not even including the vast amounts of dreck or unfinished works that no one ever published that would somehow get included in this magical library.

This building is so vast that your time would be better spent fighting the fire rather than grabbing one book and running for an exit that could be miles away.

Hell, even if we're discounting magic we could be looking at a massive data center with numerous HDDs filled with epubs and mobis and pdfs, and even then any archival project of this magnitude would have redundant backups off-site.

There is just no way this hypothetical situation makes any sort of rational sense, and I realize I'm nitpicking and being sort of a dick but I'm bored as hell.

i thought the same way, honestly. but going with the whole scenario and limiting yourself to answering the general question, it's a freaking impossible one. i think it's just typical of people to try to out think a scenario like this to not need to confront having to make an impossible or near impossible choice. it's good to try to think outside of the box to solve a lose lose situation.

>most big
>an arson
>u can

Come on dude.

>theoretical
>if
>somehow
>magical
>could
>hypothetical situation
>nitpicking

autism

dont worry, at least this is not a kind of system that each comment alters the finality of the thread

>a arson
cmon dude

what

w0s is yuor problem m9

Arson is the act of burning things. Arsonist is a person who burns things.

>not an arsoning
cmon user

arson is a noun.

an arson is correct.

"there was an arson today on main street"

it sounds like a verb though

If we're talking about losing knowledge, Principa Mathematica.

If we're talking about fiction, the Norton Anthology of English Poetry.

Not entirely impossible, if you subscribe to utilitarian views one would simply grab the rarest work there and leave. It's not like there aren't other copies of these books elsewhere.

If I really had to choose a book, for myself I would pick a copy of the original Bible. Would be nice to see what the original author wrote down and eliminate any possibilities of mistranslations or alterations to the original text.

If I were to choose for the world? That's an even tougher one. It is indeed easy to say 'rarest text' but that could be a short story Poe tossed in the trash five words in. Perhaps the cipher for the Voynich manuscript, if there was one? I would want it to be a text that had the potential to alter the course of history, not something nice yet inconsequential like the lost writings of Dostoevsky or Pynchon or something.

then i was correct, ight?

most big was a mistake, but cmon dont be autistic

I'm not saying it's grammatically incorrect, it's just something no one would say.

I won't deny it.

its not that rare to say "there is an arson"

the bible eh? but that'd leave a chance for the cult to grow more powerful. I didn't even think of religious texts, but arguably from a utilitarian perspective, something non-fiction would be preferable, something that could save unneeded deaths, like i mentioned earlier, a medical text. the last thing we'd need alongside the loss of presumably all recorded text is a fucking plague or something. along those lines. i would imagine that saving art would be a bit pointless from a utilitarian perspective, as it has no realistic use aside from an aesthetic one, or maybe a vaguely philosophical one. rarity would become meaningless once you realize that any book you chose would immediately become the rarest book in existence, since it's the only one left. i wonder if there would be some way to cheat and choose a gigantic compilation of literature, but that's against the spirit of the question i guess.

It really is.

It's like saying "There was a perjury in court today". It's grammatically correct, but awkward, and atypical.

still, a arson vs an arson, gotta go with an arson/ing

learnd that word in highschool, and im from spain, lel

dangol got arsonified

"There was arson" would be more correct. The article is unnecessary and makes it sound awkward.

what if they wanted to specify that there was only one arson? there was arson makes the possibility that there were multiple cases of arson that tore through the streets of OP's gigantic library city

I would snatch up some Greek shit too
>Aeschines for what did Socrates really talk like
>Parmenides poem not in fragments
>Zeno's full book with all the paradoxes and description and everything

OP never once mentioned that this library contained the only copy of the texts, however. Though that would be the case for the extremely rare ones. It's not like we'd suddenly lose all of our medical knowledge overnight; just the largest archive.

I am an atheist, just to get that out of the way, but there's nothing really wrong with having faith in a higher power. It's just not for me. What IS wrong, however, is interpreting the texts in a way that allows one to harm others, or using the clout of organized religion to impede the happiness and liberty of others who simply have different beliefs.

With the original Bible, there would presumably be less room for creative interpretations, and a little bit less of a chance for tomfoolery.

I wonder, though, if I would go for the original text of the Old Testament or for both Testaments?

Why would that matter? You would never say "There were some arsons today"

>since it's the only one left.
So you think because one large library burnt down there are no more books at all anywhere?

I totally disagree. It's probably going to ve a regionalism but you are giving out some dumbass advice either way broheim.

Yeah, well you're gay.

then whose advice should i remember?

I dunno, OP does say "contains every book" so i imagine that means that every book, even "my diary desu", plus that makes the book more interesting.
and yeah, i agree about the higher power thing, and i'm a cautious deist, but i doubt a whole buncha goat fucker's brimstone and bloody war would really help the world compared to a biological text or a genuinely brilliant work of literature. I mean, the bible was great and all, but I was never taken aback by its poetic brilliance or anything, and most of its philosophical ideas could be bested by more modern and practical treatises. and in the end, the book would indeed be used for harming others. inevitably.

well when in doubt, reform the sentence. if there's doubt around "an arson", then write it in a way so there's no doubt, like "Arson were declared to have been eventualized".
(that's a joke, by the way)
something like "But the library begins burning as a result of an Arsonist" maybe.

but what if there was no arsonist?
what if the arson itself began with a fatuous fire?

well, then it's not an arson, arson requires someone to have set the fire.

some kind of supreme being like a god or just providence as the source of this loss

w-what

then it could be an arson dont u think

Norton Anthology of English Lit. The only choice for both scenarios.