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The Library of By Jorge
Luis Borges
The
universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and
perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between,
surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see,
interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries
is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the
sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling,
scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a
narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and
to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very
small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy
one's fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which
sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there
is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer
from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it were, why this
illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces
represent and promise the infinite ... Light is provided by some spherical
fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in
each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant. Like all
men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of
a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly
decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the
hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious
hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my
body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the
fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists
argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at
least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal
room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them
a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is
continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony
is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice
now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose
exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is
inaccessible. There
are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf contains
thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten
pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are
black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; these
letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know that
this incoherence at one time seemed mysterious. Before summarizing the
solution (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic projections, is perhaps the
capital fact in history) I wish to recall a few axioms. First:
The Library exists ab aeterno. This truth, whose immediate corollary
is the future eternity of the world, cannot be placed in doubt by any
reasonable mind. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance
or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of
shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler
and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god. To
perceive the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to
compare these crude wavering symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the
cover of a book, with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate,
perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical. Second: The
orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number.[1]
This finding made it possible, three hundred years
ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and solve satisfactorily
the problem which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature
of almost all the books. One which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit
fifteen ninety-four was made up of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from
the first line to the last. Another (very much consulted in this area) is a
mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says Oh time thy
pyramids. This much is already known: for every sensible line of
straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal
jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians
repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and
equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of
one's palm ... They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the
twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental
and that the books signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see,
is not entirely fallacious.) For a
long time it was believed that these impenetrable books corresponded to past
or remote languages. It is true that the most ancient men, the first
librarians, used a language quite different from the one we now speak; it is
true that a few miles to the right the tongue is dialectical and that ninety
floors farther up, it is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but
four hundred and ten pages of inalterable MCV's cannot correspond to any
language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be. Some insinuated
that each letter could influence the following one and that the value of MCV
in the third line of page 71 was not the one the same series may have in
another position on another page, but this vague thesis did not prevail.
Others thought of cryptographs; generally, this conjecture has been accepted,
though not in the sense in which it was formulated by its originators. Five
hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon[2] came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which
had nearly two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a wandering decoder
who told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said they were
Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic
Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The
content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis,
illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These
examples made it possible for a librarian of genius to discover the
fundamental law of the Library. This thinker observed that all the books, no
matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the
space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also
alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there
are no two identical books. From these two incontrovertible premises he
deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the
possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number
which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed
history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful
catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the
demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration 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 true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages,
the interpolations of every book in all books. When it
was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was
one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an
intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose
eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified,
the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time
a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy
which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and
retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned
their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain
intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow
corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine
stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death
cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others
went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons
of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers
did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, or
some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero. At that
time it was also hoped that a clarification of humanity's basic mysteries --
the origin of the Library and of time -- might be found. It is verisimilar
that these grave mysteries could be explained in words: if the language of
philosophers is not sufficient, the multiform Library will have produced the
unprecedented language required, with its vocabularies and grammars. For four
centuries now men have exhausted the hexagons ... There are official
searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function:
they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a
broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of
galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf
through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover
anything. As was
natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression. The
certitude that some shelf in some hexagon held precious books and that these
precious books were inaccessible, seemed almost intolerable. A blasphemous
sect suggested that the searches should cease and that all men should juggle
letters and symbols until they constructed, by an improbable gift of chance,
these canonical books. The authorities were obliged to issue severe orders.
The sect disappeared, but in my childhood I have seen old men who, for long
periods of time, would hide in the latrines with some metal disks in a
forbidden dice cup and feebly mimic the divine disorder. We also
know of another superstition of that time: that of the Man of the Book. On
some shelf in some hexagon (men reasoned) there must exist a book which is
the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has
gone through it and he is analogous to a god. In the language of this zone
vestiges of this remote functionary's cult still persist. Many wandered in
search of Him. For a century they have exhausted in vain the most varied
areas. How could one locate the venerated and secret hexagon which housed
Him? Someone proposed a regressive method: To locate book A, consult first
book B which indicates A's position; to locate book B, consult first a book
C, and so on to infinity ... In adventures such as these, I have squandered
and wasted my years. It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total
book on some shelf of the universe;[3]I pray to the unknown gods that a man -- just one, even
though it were thousands of years ago! -- may have examined and read it. If
honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let
heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated,
but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified.
The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library and that the
reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous
exception. They speak (I know) of the ``feverish Library whose chance volumes
are constantly in danger of changing into others and affirm, negate and
confuse everything like a delirious divinity.'' These words, which not only
denounce the disorder but exemplify it as well, notoriously prove their
authors' abominable taste and desperate ignorance. In truth, the Library
includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical
symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to
observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is
entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp
and another Axaxaxas mlö. These phrases, at first glance incoherent,
can no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a
justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the
Library. I cannot combine some characters Dhcmrlchtdj |
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I have
just written the word ``infinite.'' I have not interpolated this adjective
out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is not illogical to think that the
world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote
places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an
end -- which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that
the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest
this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and
cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after
centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same
disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is
gladdened by this elegant hope.[4]
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Reprinted
from the HyperDiscordia Reading Room.
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