I discovered it while looking for his famous classification of animals. The number is the population of books in the Library of Babel – a universe which contains every possible 410 page book using 25 characters and with 40 lines per page, 80 characters per line. Your complete life story (including the parts that have not happened yet) is in there – the trick is finding it.
The original search – for the classification – turned up an additional connection. The title of the essay containing Borges’ list is ‘The Analytical language of John Wilkins‘. Wilkins, mathmatician, cryptographer, founder of the Royal Society, figures into Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and Wilkins did in fact try to create an a-priori language.
Two thoughts… First, I really need to find a copy of Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language. Second – Argentina looks better and better as a place to relocate to. Big sky, Buenos Aires, tango, horse culture, grills, and they produced Borges. Yow.
Third thought (later) – Artur C. Clarke’s Nine Billion Names of God.