Two similar Borges stories - Babel and Babylon

Two similar Birges stories: The Babylon Lottery posits a case in which the citizens of Babylon play a lottery like any other but gradually people lose interest so the state that runs the lot adds a twist : for every 20 or so winning ticket there is 1'losing ticket and the  "winner" has to pay a fine. Interest picks up. Those who don't pay go to jail and eventually they end up skipping the payment and losing tickets go to jail. Then it becomes worse and stranger - losing tix may face torture or death and even later they may face odd commands ranging from order to kill someone to moving a grain of sand from one beach to another. So anything that may happen in Babylon - a man strangles his wife is one cited incident - may be the result of the lottery. Eventually we the readers realize that in a sense we are all part of a similar vast lottery which is life itself. Or, on another darker level, this is also a kafkaesque story about state control. Similar story: The library of Babel - in which Birges posits a library that hold books with every possible combo of letters possible - so not exactly an infinite library but infinite for all intents. People live and die in this library searching for particular books - he imagines books of vindication that will exculpate each living person - so what is this about - other than that yes  we are all searching amid an infinite number of possibilities and choices every second of every day for some form of truth meaning and happiness. The world may appear to be random and infinite but it is not so - it is only that it is too vast for comprehension. Borges slyly notes that in fact words may have unique meanings for each person or in each book so done really understand what he (or anyone)!is saying or writing even if we think we do? At the end he raises another possibility that all of the combination of words and letter could exist on a single book w infinitely thin pages.