Discerning the Transfinite

6th of First Seed, 4E199

Neloth,

From one bibliophile to another, I am honored by your inquiry regarding what I can tell you about the known contents of the texts of Apocrypha which have found their way to Tamriel. There's much to be said about it. But I would rather knock some sense into your head. Hermaeus Mora's library isn't worth all the respect you give it. He's a dilettante and his infinite library is a sort of quixotic and frankly amateurish way to approach being a librarian. He doesn't know everything and his library doesn't contain everything. It's impossible.

Tell you what, I'll even talk you through why it's impossible. Assume Apocrypha contains every possible book. This is an infinite number of books, but that's no problem for either a Daedric prince or your own vivid imagination. Each book can itself be infinitely long, I don't care. Number the books 1, 2, 3... and so on forever. Now take your stylus and a piece of parchment and write your own book according to the following instructions. Take book number 1 from Apocrypha and find its first word. Write down some other word. Doesn't matter which word, as long as it's not the same as the first word in Apocrypha's first book. Now take book number 2 from Apocrypha and find its second word. The second word you write down in your book can be anything except the second word from Apocrypha's second book. Now repeat this process forever.

The infinitely long book you've just written is different from Book 1 in its first word, different from Book 2 in its second word, and different from any Book N in its Nth word. It's different from every book in Apocrypha. Thus the book you've written is not in Apocrypha. But this argument was built on the assumption that Apocrypha contains every possible book. Because this assumption leads to a contradiction, it can't possibly be true.

Oh, and if you ever happen to encounter Hermaeus Mora on your travels, you had damn well better not mention this to him.

Respectfully,

Urag gro-Shub