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 (as others call it, the Library) is composed of an indefinite number, perhaps infinite, of hexagonal galleries, with vast wells of ventilation in the middle, outlined by a very low hand-railing. Standing in any hexagon you can see the lower levels and higher levels – interminably. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five on each side, cover all but two faces; its height, approximately that of two stories, exceed almost instantaneously 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, identical to all. To the left and right of the hallway are two miniscule cubbies. One of them affords just enough space to the person to sleep standing on their feet. The other is designated to satisfy your basic needs. A spiral staircase is waiting beyond that, which plunges to the depths and rises to 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 true, why that illusionary duplication?); I prefer to dream that the burnished surfaces form and promise the infinite… Light foreruns some spherical fruits that bring with them the name of lamps. There are two in each hexagon: intersecting. The light they emit is insufficient, yet incessant.
As have all the men in the Library, I had traveled in my youth; I had made a pilgrimage in search of a book, perhaps for 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 over 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. This is the reason why a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics pretend that the ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber with one tome of continuous loin, which completely inverts the walls; but its testimony is suspicious; its 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 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 discrepancy, 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. No one in their reasonable mind can doubt this truth, a truth whose immediate corollary is the continuity of this eternal world. The man, the imperfect librarian, can be the work of randomness 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 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 the organic letters of the interior: punctual, delicate, blacker than black, inimitably symmetric.
The Second: There are twenty-five orthographic symbols[1]. This fact permitted us, 300 years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and satisfactorily resolve the problem that no previous conjecture had decoded: the chaotic and informal nature of almost all books. One, which my father saw somewhere in some hexagon in the ninety-fourth circuit, consisted of the letters M C V devilishly 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”. It is known: for every reasonable line or straightforward fact, there are leagues and leagues of cacophonous foolery, jumbled words – incoherent. (I know of an untamed region whose librarians repudiate the superstitious and vain custom of searching for sense in the books and equate it to searching for sense in dreams or in the chaotic lines jotted by the hand… They admit that the inventors of the writing mimicked the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain their view that that is a lax application and that the books mean nothing in and of themselves. This opinion, we’ll see, is nothing erroneous.)
Over the course of time one thought that these impermeable books corresponded to preterit languages, remote in their existence. It is true that the first librarians, man from the past, used a language quite different than the languages of today; it is true that languages are merely dialects of the same only miles to the right, yet languages of ninety floors above are mutually incoherent. All of this – I repeat – is true, but 410 pages of the invariable repetition of M C V does not correspond to any language, be it dialectal or primitive. Some insinuated that each letter could influence the subsequent and that the worth of M C V in the third line 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 thought about cryptography; universally that theory had been accepted, although not in the same sense in which the inventors formulated it.
500 years ago, the head[2] of the central hexagon came across a book just as confusing as the rest, but one that 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 it was 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 through the 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 thinker observed that all books, however diverse they are, contain 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 are not, in the vast Library, two identical books. From those incontrovertible principles he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves comprise of all possible combinations of the twenty-some orthographic symbols (a number, though colossal, 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 catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the manifestation of fallacy in these catalogues, the manifestation of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the veridical enlistment of your death, the version of each book in every language, 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 curtly usurped the unlimited dimensions of the hope. In that time one spoke much of the Vindications: books of apology and of prophecy, which forever vindicated the acts of each man of the universe and guarded prodigious mysteries for the future. Thousands of greedy people abandoned their natal hexagon and launched themselves up the stairwells, urged by the vain proposition of finding their Vindication. Those pilgrims quarreled in the narrow corridors, uttered obscure vulgarities, 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 that the probability that a man finds his, or some traitorous variation of his, is zero to none.
Man hoped for, then, the clarification on the basic mysteries of humanity: the origin of the Library and of time. It is plausible that those grave mysteries can be explained in words: if not adequately rendered in the language of the philosopher, the multi-form 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 role: they arrive dejected; they speak of a stairway with no steps that nearly killed them; they speak of galleries and of stairways with the librarian; often, they take the book closest to them and they peruse through it, in search of infamous words. Visibly, nobody hopes to find anything.
The riotous hope was followed by – as natural – an excessive depression. The certainty that some shelf in some hexagon enclosed precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible, 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 drastic orders. The sect disappeared, but in my early childhood I had seen old men that largely hid themselves in the latrines, with some discs of metal in a prohibited beaker, to weakly remediate divine disorder.
Others, inversely, believed that the primordial was to eliminate useless works. They invaded the hexagons, they exhibited credentials – not always inauthentic, they perused a volume with nuisance and they condemned entire shelves: the senseless erasure of millions of books is due to their hygienic furor, ascetic. Their name is execrated, but those who deplore the “treasures” that their frenzy destroyed neglect two notorious facts. One: The Library is so enormous that the entirety of human origin 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, except for 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. They urged delirium of conquering the books of the Crimson Hexagon: books of a lesser format than the natural ones; omnipotent, illustrated, magical.
We also know of another superstition of such a time: of the Man of the Book. In some shelf in some hexagon (men deduced) should exist a book that is the perfect source and compendium of all the others: some librarian has come across it and he is analogous to a god. People still speak of the remnants leftover from the cult of that remote official. Many have made a pilgrimage in search of Him. Over the course of a century they exhausted in vain even 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 expended my years. It doesn’t seem implausible to me that in some shelf of the Universe there exists the 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 has some sort of terrible meaning enveloped in secret tongues. Nobody can articulate a syllable that is not full of tenderness and fears; that is not in some of those languages the mighty name of a god. To speak is to incur in tautologies. This useless, wordy epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes on the five shelves in one of the uncountable hexagons, and also in 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 where library is bread or a pyramid or 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 fact that all is written annuls us and makes us conceited. I know districts in which the youth bows themselves down before the books and kisses the pages with barbarity, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. The epidemics, the heretic discords, the pilgrimages that inevitably degenerate outlaws, have all decimated the population. I think I have mentioned the suicides, each year more and more frequent. Perhaps old age and fear deceives me, but I suppose that the human species – the only species – exists to extinguish, and that the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly immobile, armed with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret. I just wrote infinite. I have not interpolated that adjective through a rhetorical custom; I’d say it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who perceive it limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons inconceivably cease, which is an absurdity. Those who imagine it without limits forget that there is a finite number of books. I dare posit a solution for this enigma: 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.
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[1] The original manuscript does not contain numerals or upper-cases. The punctuation has been limited to the comma and 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. 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: it’s sufficient that a book is possible in order for it to 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, a single volume would suffice, in a standard 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 pages; the inconceivable central page would not have a backside.