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 (the Library, as called by others) is composed of an indefinite number, perhaps infinite, of hexagonal galleries, with vast wells of ventilation in the middle, closed by a low hand-railing. From whatever hexagon you can see the lower levels and higher levels – interminably. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, by five large shelves on each side, cover all but two sides; its height, which is around two stories****, exceed nearly instantly** that of the normal library. One of the open sides leads to a narrow hallway that spits out into another gallery, identical to the first, and identical to all. To the left and right of the hallway there are two minuscule cabinets (offices****). You can sleep on foot in one and in the other you satisfy your basic needs. Through there passes a spiral staircase, which plunges and rises to the remote. In the hallway there is a mirror that faithfully replicates** appearances. The men feel like inferring from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if this were true, to what illusionary duplication?); I prefer to dream that the burnished surfaces form and promise the infinite… Light proceeds from some spherical fruits that bring with them the name of lamps. There are two in each hexagon: transversal. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant.
As have all the men in the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have made a pilgrimage in search of a book, perhaps of the catalogue of all catalogues; now that my eyes can’t decipher what I write, I prepare myself to die some leagues away from the hexagon in which I was born. Dead, there will not be a lack of pious hands that throw me to the railing; my grave will be unfathomable; my body will sink deeply and will decompose and dissolve in the begotten belly of the plunge, an infinite one at that. I affirm that the Library is interminable. Idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space, or, at least, of our intuitions about space. The reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics pretend that the ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber with on grand book/tome of continuous loin, which completely flips/inverts the walls; but its testimony is suspicious; its words, obscure*. Allow me, for now, to recite the classic dogma: The Library is a sphere whose thorough center is any hexagon, whose circumference is inaccessible.
For each wall of each hexagon there are five shelves; each shelf encloses thirty-two books of uniform format; each book is 410 pages; each page, 40 lines; each line, of some 80 black letters. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know this disconnect*, at some time, seemed mysterious. Before summarizing the solution (whose discovery, despite its tragic projections, is perhaps capital fact of history) I want to remember some axioms.
The First: The Library exists ab aeterno. This truth whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, no reasonable mind can doubt. The man, the imperfect librarian, can be the work of randomness or of malevolent demiurges; the universe, with its elegant dotation of shelves, of enigmatic tomes, of indefatigable stairways for the traveler and of latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god. To perceive the distance there is between the divine and the human, it is sufficient to compare these rude, tremulous symbols that my fallible hand scribbles on the cover of a book, with organic letters of the interior: punctuals, delicate, blacker than black, inimitably symmetrical.
The Second: The number of orthographic symbols is twenty-five[1]. This testing permitted, 300 years ago, us to formulate a general theory of The Library and satisfactorily resolve the problem that no conjecture had deciphered: the informal nature and chaos of almost all the books. One, which my father saw in a hexagon of the ninety-fourth circuit, consisted of the letters MCV perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (consulted by many in this zone) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the penultimate page says “Oh tiempo tus pirámides. One already knows: for a reasonable line or straight news there are leagues of cacophonous foolery, jumbled words, incoherent. (I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the superstitious and vain custom of searching for sense in the books, and they equated the region to the searching in dreams or in the chaotic lines of the hand… they admit that the inventors of the writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they sustained that that application is casual and that the books mean nothing in themselves. This dogma, we will already see is nothing fallacious.)
Over the course of time one thought that these impenetrable books corresponded to preterit languages, remote. It is true that man from the past, the first librarians, used a language quite different than that languages of today; it is true that some miles to the right the languages is dialectal and that ninety floors above, it is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but 410 pages of inalterable M C V cannot correspond to any language, be it dialectal or rudimentary as it is. Some insinuated that each letter could influence the subsequent and that the worth of M C V in the third line of page 71 was not the one which allows form the same series in another position of another page, but this vague thesis did not prosper. Others thought in cryptography; universally that conjecture had been accepted, although not in the sense that the inventors formulated it.
500 years ago, the chief[2] of the central hexagon came across a book as confusing as the rest, but one which had almost two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his finding to a walking decoder, who told him that they were drafted in Portuguese; others told him Yiddish. It took a century to establish the language: a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of the Guaraní, with inflections of Classical Arabic. He also deciphered the content: notions of combinatory analysis, illustrated by examples of variations with unlimited repetition. Those examples allowed a genius librarian to discover the fundamental law in the Library. This thinker observed that all books, however diverse they are, cover equal elements: the space, the period, the coma, the 22 letters of the alphabet.
He also pleaded a fact that all travelers had confirmed: There is not, in the vast Library, two identical books. Of those incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all possible combinations of the twenty-so orthographic symbols (number, although very vast, not infinite) or in other words all that is expressible: in all languages. All: the thorough history of the future, the autobiographies of the arch angels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the demonstration of the fallacy of these catalogs, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalog, the gospel of Basilides, the commentary of that gospel, the commentary of the commentary of that gospel, the veridical relation of your death, the version of each book in all languages, the interpolations of each book in all books, the treaty that Beda was able to write (and didn’t 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 of extravagant felicity. All the men felt like masters of an intact and secret treasure. There wasn’t personal problem or world problems whose eloquent solution would not exist: in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe brusquely usurped the unlimited dimensions of the hope. In that time one spoke much of the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy, which forever vindicated the acts of each man of the universe and guarded prodigious arcanes for the future. Thousands of greedy people abandoned their natal hexagon and threw themselves up the stairwells, urged by the vain proposition of finding their Vindication. Those pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, uttered obscure curses, hung themselves in divine stairwells, tossed deceitful books to the depths of the tunnels, died stumbling over man in remote regions. Others became crazy… The Vindications exist (I have seen two which people of the future refer to, to people perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember the possibility of man finding his, or some preferred variation of his, is computable to zero.
One also waited for, then, the acclamation of basic mysteries of humanity: the origin of the Library and of Time. It is plausible that those grave mysteries can explain themselves in words: if not sufficient the language of the philosophers, the multi-uniform Library will have produced the inaudible language that is required and the vocabularies and grammars of that language. Four centuries ago already, men had exhausted the hexagons… There are official searchers, Inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their job: they always arrive surrendered; they speak of a stairway without steps that almost killed them; they speak of galleries and of stairways with the librarian; some time, they take the book closest to them and they peruse through it, in search of infamous words. Visibly, nobody hopes to find anything.
To the riotous hope, was followed, as it is natural, an excessive depression. The certainty that some shelf in some hexagon enclosed precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible, it seemed almost intolerable. A blasphemous sector suggested that they cease the searches, and that all men shuffled letters and symbols, until they constructed, through an improbable gift of chance, those canonical books. The authorities were seen as obligated to enact sever orders. The sect disappeared, but in my early childhood I have seen old men that largely hid themselves in the latrines, with some discs of metal in a prohibited beaker, and weakly re-mediated the divine disorder.
Others, inversely, believed that the primordial was to eliminate useless works. They invaded the hexagons, they exhibited credentials not always false, they perused with nuisance a volume and they condemned entire shelves: their hygienic furor, ascetic, is due to the senseless perdition of millions of books. Their name is execrated, but those who deplore the “treasures” that their frenzy destroyed, they neglect two notorious facts. One: the Library is so enormous that all its reduction of human origin results 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 different, but rather off by one letter or one comma. Against popular opinion, I dare suppose that the consequences of the depredations committed by the Purifiers, have been exaggerated by the horror that those fanatics provoked. The urge of delirium of conquering the books of the Crimson Hexagon: books of a lesser format than the natural ones; omnipotent, illustrated and magic.
We also know of another superstition of such a time: that of the Man of the Book. In some shelf of some hexagon (men thought) should exist a book that is the perfect source and compendium of all the others: some librarian has come across it and it is analogous to a god. In the language of this zone persists even vestiges of the cult of that remote official. Many made a pilgrimage in search of Him. Over the course of a century they exhausted in vain the most diverse of destinations. How do you localize the venerated secret hexagon that they had accommodated? Somebody proposed a regressive method: to localize Book A, consult a Book B that indicates the location of Book A; to localize Book B, consult a book C, and so on and so forth until infinity… In such adventures, I have lavished and consumed my years. It doesn’t seem to me implausible that in some shelf of the Universe there is a total book[3]; I beg the ignorant gods that a man – one man, whoever it may be, thousands of years ago! – has examined and read it. If the honor and wisdom and felicity are not for me, be they for others. Be it that heaven exists, although my place is hell. That I be outraged and annihilated, but that in an instant, in a being, Your enormous Library is justified.
The impious affirm that the absurdity is normal in the Library and the reasonable (and even the humble and purely coherent) is almost a miraculous exception. They speak (I know it) of “the hectic Library, whose random volumes run the incessant dace of morphing themselves into others and that all affirm it, deny it, and confuse it like a divinity that raves.” Those words that not only denounce the disorder but also exemplify it as well, notoriously prove its pessimistic pleasure and its ignorant despair. In effect, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations that the 25 orthographic symbols permit, but not a lone disparate absolute. It’s useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons that I administer is titled Thunder Hairstyle, and another The Plaster Cramp, and another Axaxaxas Mlo. Those propositions, at first seemingly incoherent, without doubt are capacities of a cryptographic or allegoric justification; that justification is verbal, and, ex hypothesis, already a figure in the Library. I cannot combine characters
Dhcmrichtdj
That the divine Library has not foreseen and that in some of its secret tongues do not enclose a terrible meaning. Nobody can articulate a syllable that is not full of tenderness and fears; that isn’t in some of those languages the powerful name of a god. To speak is to incur in tautologies. This useless and wordy epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves of one of the uncountable hexagons, and also its refutation. (A number n of possible languages uses the same vocabulary; in some, the symbol biblioteca admits the correct definition of ubiquitous and perdurable system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread of pyramid of any other thing, and the seven words that define it have another value. You, reading right now, are you sure you understand my language?) The methodic writing distracts me from the present condition of men. The certainty that all is written annuls us and ghosts us. I know districts in which the youth prostrates themselves before the books, and kiss with barbarity the pages, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. The epidemics, the heretic discords, the pilgrimages that inevitably degenerate outlaws, have decimated the population. I think I have mentioned the suicides, each year more frequent. Perhaps they trick me old age and fear, but I suppose that the human species – the only – exists to extinguish an that the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly immobile, armed with precious volumes, useless, uncorruptable, secret. I just wrote infinite. I have not interpolated that adjective through a rhetorical custom; I saw that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it limited, postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can inconceivably cease, which is absurd. Those who imagine it without limits, forget that there is a finite number of books. I dare insinuate this solution for the old problem: The Library is unlimited and periodic. If an eternal traveler traversed it in any direction, he would see the cape of the centuries that the same volumes repeat themselves in the same disorder (which, repeated, would be an order; The Order). My solitude grows joyful with this 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 to the period. Those two signs, the space, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet are the twenty-five sufficient symbols that enumerate the unknown. (Editor’s Note)
[2] Before, for each three hexagons there was a man. The suicide and the pulmonary diseases have destroyed that proportion. Memory of indescribable melancholy: at times I have traveled many nights through corridors and polished stairways without finding a single librarian.
[3] I repeat: enough that a book is possible so that it exists. Only the impossible is excluded. For example, no book is also a stairway, although without doubt there are books that discuss and negate and demonstrate that possibility and others whose structure corresponds to that of a stairway.
[4] Letizia Álvarez de Toledo has observed that the vast Library is useless; in rigor, single volume would be sufficient, in common format, with a font size of nine or ten, which consisted of an infinite number of infinitely smaller pages. (Cavalieri from the XXVII Century said that all physical body is the superposition of an infinite number of planes.) The management of that silky vade mecum wouldn’t be comfortable: each apparent page would unfold into analogous ones; the inconceivable central page would not have a backside.