By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters…
The Anatomy of a Melancholy¸ part. 2, sect. II, mem. IV.
The universe (known by others as the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with ventilation shafts down the middle, guarded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see levels above and below – on and on, forever. Every gallery is arranged like any other: twenty bookshelves, five on each side, cover all but two of the hexagon’s six sides; its height, from floor to ceiling, barely exceeds that of a normal librarian. One of the open sides of the hexagon leads to a narrow hallway that opens into another gallery, identical to the first, identical to all. To the left and right of the hallway are two small compartments: one offers barely enough space for a person to sleep standing up. The other is designated to satisfy basic needs. Beyond that is a spiral staircase that winds up and down into the remote. In the hallway there is a mirror that faithfully replicates appearances. From this mirror, men infer that the Library is not infinite (if it were the case, then why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that the burnished surfaces act as avatars and harbingers of the infinite… The light stems from some spherical fruits that bear the name “bulbs”. There are two in each hexagon, transversal. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant.
As most have, I have traveled in my youth; I have journeyed in search of a book, perhaps the catalog of all catalogs, and now that my eyes are barely able to decipher what it is I write, I prepare myself to die only a couple leagues away from the hexagon in which I was born. When I die, waiting for me will be a host of divine hands, ready to throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air; my body will plunge into the depths and it will dissolve, and it will decay in the draft of wind engendered by my fall, an infinite one. I affirm that the Library is endless. The Idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are the necessary form of absolute space, or, at least, of our perception of space. They reason that triangular or pentagonal rooms are inconceivable. (The Mystics claim that their ecstasies reveal to them a circular chamber containing but one continuous tome whose spine travels completely around the walls; but their testimony is suspicious – their words, obscure. That cyclical book is God.) Allow me, now, to recite the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose absolute center is any hexagon, whose circumference is unattainable.
Each wall of each hexagon includes five bookshelves; each bookshelf encloses thirty-two books of the same format; each book is four hundred and ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, some eighty black letters. Letters mark the spine of each book, but these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know this discrepancy between the title and the content, at one point, seemed mysterious. Before summarizing the solution for this mystery – whose discovery, despite its fatal consequences, is perhaps the most significant event in all of history – I want to remember some axioms.
The First: The Library exists ab aeterno. No one in their reasonable mind can doubt this truth, a truth whose immediate corollary is the continuity of this eternal world. Man, the imperfect librarian, can either be the work of chance or of malevolent demiurges; the universe – with its elegant endowment of shelves, enigmatic tomes, indefatigable stairwells for the traveler, and latrines for the seated librarian – can only be the work of a god. To perceive this distance between the divine and the human, it would suffice to compare these crude, shaky symbols that my fallible hand scribbles on the cover of a book with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, black, inimitably symmetric.
The Second: There are twenty-five orthographic symbols[1]. This fact permitted us, three-hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and satisfactorily solve the mystery that no previous conjecture was able to decode — the chaotic and disorderly nature of almost all books. One, which my father had seen somewhere in some hexagon in circuit 15-94, consisted of the letters M C V perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (consulted by many in this zone) is a mere labyrinth of letters, with a penultimate page that reads, “Oh time your pyramids”. It is widely known: for every rational line or straightforward fact, there are leagues of cacophonous foolery, jumbled words – incoherent at their core. (I know of a semi barbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the “superstitious and vain” custom of searching for meaning in the books and equate it to searching for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on our palms… They concede that the inventors of the writing mimicked the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain their view that that is coincidental and that the books mean nothing in and of themselves. This opinion, we will see, is not a total fallacy.)
For a long time, mankind had believed that these impenetrable books corresponded to ancient tongues and preterit languages. It is true that the most ancient of peoples – the first librarians – used a language quite different than the one spoken today; it is true that languages become mere dialects of one another only a few miles to the right, yet ninety floors above they diverge into mutually unintelligible codes. All of this – I repeat – is true, but four hundred and ten pages of the invariable repetition of M C V do not correspond to any language, be it dialectal or primitive. Some insinuated that each letter could influence the subsequent and that the value of M C V on line 3 of page 71 could not have the same value as the same series in another position of another page – but this vague thesis did not stick. Others considered the possibility of cryptography; universally this conjecture had been accepted, though not in the way the inventors had intended.
Five hundred years ago, the chief of one of the upper hexagons[2] came across a book just as puzzling as the rest, but it had almost two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his finding to a traveling decipherer, who told him that the lines were written in Portuguese; others said it was Yiddish. It took a century for experts to determine the language: A Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guaraní, with inflections from classical Arabic. The content of the book was also determined: notions of combinatory analysis, illustrated by examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These examples allowed a genius librarian to discover the fundamental law in the Library. This philosopher observed that all books, however distinct they may be, contain the same elements: the space, the period, the coma, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also proposed an idea that all travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library, there are not two identical books. From these incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves comprise all possible combinations of the twenty-some orthographic symbols (a number, though unfathomable, not infinite), or in other words, all that is expressible; in all languages. Everything – the complete history of the future, the autobiographies of the arch angels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the manifestation of fallacy in those catalogs, the manifestation of the fallacy of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the truth about your death, the translations of each book in every language, the interpolations of each book in all books, the treaty that Beda was able to write (and did not write) about the mythology of the Saxons, the lost books of Tacit.
When it was proclaimed that the Library encompassed all books, the first impression was that of extravagant joy. All men felt as if they had the key to a secret treasure – extant, intact. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist somewhere, in some hexagon. The universe was justified; the universe had surpassed the limitless dimensions of human hope. During that time, they spoke much about the Vindications: books of apologia and of prophecy that would vindicate the actions of each man in the universe once and for all and that withheld the mysteries behind all of their futures. Thousands of greedy individuals abandoned their sweet natal hexagon and flung themselves up stairwells, fueled by the vain impulse to find their Vindication. Those pilgrims quarreled in narrow corridors, uttered obscure curses, strangled each other in divine stairways, tossed deceitful volumes to the depths of the tunnels, were themselves thrown over the banister by man in remote regions. Others became crazy… The Vindications do exist (I have seen two which refer to people of the future, people perhaps not imaginary) but those who went in search of it did not realize that the likelihood that a man finds his – or some perfidious variation of his – is equal to zero.
During that period men had also hoped that the fundamental mysteries of humanity – the origin of the Library and the origin of time – would be revealed to them. It very well could be that those profound mysteries are explainable in words: if not adequate in the tongue of the philosopher, then in the inaudible language required for such an explanation, along with its vocabularies and grammars – all products of the multi-form Library. It has already been four centuries since men started exhausting every hexagon… There are official searchers, the Inquisitors. I have seen them about in their duties: they arrive dejected; they speak about a stairway with no steps that nearly killed them; they speak with the librarian about galleries and stairways; often, they take the book closest to them and peruse through it, in search of infamous words. Clearly, nobody expects to find anything.
This period of extravagant joy, as natural, was followed by an excessive depression. The notion that some shelf in some hexagon enclosed precious books and that those precious books were and would forever be out of reach, seemed almost intolerable. A blasphemous sect called for the end of the searches, and suggested that all men shuffle letters and symbols until those precious books, through the improbable gift of chance, were constructed. The authorities were seen as obligated to enforce these drastic orders. The sect disappeared, but in my childhood I had seen old men that hid themselves in the latrines, with some discs of metal in a prohibited dice cup, incapably mimicking the divine disorder.
Others, inversely, made it a priority to eliminate useless works. They would invade the hexagons, flash credentials not always false, disgustedly leaf through volumes, and condemn entire shelves: this senseless erasure of millions of books can be attributed to their hygienic, ascetic zeal. Their name is now execrated, and those who deplore the “treasures” destroyed by their frenzy neglect two widely known facts. The first: The Library is so enormous that all human abatement is but infinitesimal. The other: each copy is unique, irreplaceable, but – because the Library is total – there are always various hundreds of thousands of imperfect facsimiles, of works that are not distinguishable apart from one letter or one comma. Against popular opinion, I dare suppose that the consequences of wrongdoings committed by the Purifiers have been exaggerated because of the horror that those zealots had evoked. They were spurred on by the desire, someday, to encounter the books of the Crimson Hexagon; books that were smaller than the natural ones – books that were omnipotent, illustrated, magical.
We also know of another superstition from that time: the existence of the Man of the Book. It was believed that there must exist – somewhere on some shelf in some hexagon – a book that is the quintessence and compendium of all the others, and that some librarian must have come across it, making him analogous to a god. In this zone, there still exist remnants of the worship that this remote librarian had garnered; many have made a pilgrimage in search of Him. For a century, they scoured hexagons, reaching even the most remote destinations. But how can one locate the venerated secret hexagon that housed Him? Someone had proposed a regressive method: to locate Book A, consult a Book B that indicates the location of Book A; to locate Book B, consult a book C, and so on and so forth to infinity… It is in such activities that I have lavished and expended my years. It does not seem implausible to me that such a total book[3] exists on some shelf, somewhere in the universe; I pray to the unknown gods that someone – anyone, even thousands of years ago – has examined this book and read it. If the honor and wisdom and joy are not meant for me, be they for others. Be it that heaven exists, though my place is in hell; that I may be tormented and tortured, but that at some moment, in some being, Your enormous Library is justified.
The impious believe that chaos is at the core of the Library and that reason (even humility and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception. They speak – and this I know – of “the feverish Library, whose volumes constantly run the risk of morphing into one another, thus confirming, denying, and confusing everything all at once, like some nonsensical divinity.” Those words that not only denounce but also embody the disorder, notoriously reinforce their pessimistic pleasure and helpless ignorance. In effect, though the Library contains all possible verbal structures in all possible combinations permitted by the twenty-five orthographic symbols, it contains not one single absurdity. It would be useless to point out that the best volume, out of all the many hexagons I administer, is titled Elegant Thunder, and another The Plaster Cramp – another Axaxaxas mlö. Those phrases, though seemingly incoherent at first, can undoubtedly be justified through cryptographical or allegorical reasoning; that justification is itself verbal, and, ex hypothesis, already exists somewhere in the Library. For instance, I cannot combine the characters dhcmrichtdj that the divine Library has not foreseen and that do not carry with them some sort of horrible connotation encoded in secret tongues. It is impossible to articulate a syllable that is not full of affection or dread, that is not already in some language the mighty name of a god. To speak is to commit tautologies. This very epistle I write now, pointless and verbose, already exists somewhere in one of the thirty volumes on one of the five shelves in one of the countless hexagons – and so does its refutation. (A possible number n of languages employs the same vocabulary; in some of these languages, the symbol library is correctly defined as an “ubiquitous and perdurable system of hexagonal galleries”, yet library – the physical space as we know it – is actually a slice of bread or a pyramid or any other object, and the seven words that define it themselves have distinct definitions. You – reading me now – are you sure you understand my language?)
My methodical writing distracts me from the present state of humanity. The certainty that all has already been written annuls us, and renders us phantasmal. I know of districts in which the youth bow before books in worship and like savages kiss the pages; yet they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical discords, pilgrimages that inevitably perpetuate banditry, have decimated the population. I think I mentioned the suicides, each year growing more and more frequent. Perhaps old age and fear deceive me, but I suspect the human species – the only species – is on the brink of extinction, and that the Library will forever endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly immobile, armed with its precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.
I just wrote the word “infinite”. I did not employ that adjectives through mere rhetorical habit; I say it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who perceive it to be limited suggest that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons inconceivably cease, which is absurd. Those who conceive of it as limitless forget that there is a finite number of books. I dare put forth the following solution to this ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and periodic. If an eternal traveler were to traverse it in any direction, that traveler would find – after centuries of journeying – the same volumes repeating themselves in the same disorder (which, through repetition, becomes an order; The Order). My solitude rejoices with that elegant hope[4].
Mar de Plata, 1941.
[1] The original manuscript does not contain numerals or upper-cases. The punctuation has been limited to the comma and the period. Those two punctuation marks, the space, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet make up the twenty-five symbols needed to enumerate the unknown. (Editor’s Note)
[2] Before, there was one man for every three hexagons. Suicide and pulmonary diseases have decimated that proportion. A memory of indescribable melancholy: I have traveled many nights through corridors and polished stairways to find not a single librarian.
[3] I repeat: For a book to exist, it must simply be possible. Only the impossible is excluded. For example, no book is also a stairway, although without a doubt there are books that discuss and negate and demonstrate that very possibility, and others whose structure corresponds to that of a stairway.
[4] Letizia Álvarez de Toledo has observed that the enormous Library is pointless; in effect, all that would be needed is a single volume, of a normal size, with a font of nine or ten, that consisted of an infinite number of infinitely thin pages. (In the seventeenth century Cavalieri claimed that any solid body is the superposition of an infinite number of planes.) Handling that silken vade mecum would not be comfortable: each apparent page would unfold into more analogous pages – and the inconceivable middle page would not have a backside.