The Library of Babel
by Jorge Luis Borges
By this art you may contemplate the variations of the 23 letters...
The Anatomy of Melancholy, part 2, sect. II, mem. IV
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 from 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.
Others, inversely, believed that it was
fundamental to eliminate useless works. They invaded the hexagons, showed
credentials which were not always false, leafed through a volume with displeasure
and condemned whole shelves: their hygienic, ascetic furor caused the senseless
perdition of millions of books. Their name is execrated, but those who
deplore the ``treasures'' destroyed by this frenzy neglect two notable
facts. One: the Library is so enormous that any reduction of human origin
is infinitesimal. The other: every copy is unique, irreplaceable, but (since
the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect
facsimiles: works which differ only in a letter or a comma. Counter to
general opinion, I venture to suppose that the consequences of the Purifiers'
depredations have been exaggerated by the horror these fanatics produced.
They were urged on by the delirium of trying to reach the books in the
Crimson Hexagon: books whose format is smaller than usual, all-powerful,
illustrated and magical.
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
which the divine Library has not foreseen
and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning.
No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and
fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god.
To speak is to fall into tautology. This wordy and useless epistle already
exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves of one of the innumerable
hexagons -- and its refutation as well. (An n number of possible
languages use the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library
allows the correct definition a ubiquitous and lasting system of hexagonal
galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or
anything else, and these seven words which define it have another value.
You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?)
The methodical task of writing distracts
me from the present state of men. The certitude that everything has been
written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which
the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in
a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter.
Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate
into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned
suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and
fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species -- the unique
species -- is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated,
solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes,
useless, incorruptible, secret.
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)
Translated by J. E. I.
Notes
1
The original manuscript does not contain digits or capital letters. The
punctuation has been limited to the comma and the period. These two signs,
the space and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet are the twenty-five
symbols considered sufficient by this unknown author. (Editor's note.)
2
Before, there was a man for every three hexagons. Suicide and pulmonary
diseases have destroyed that proportion. A memory of unspeakable melancholy:
at times I have traveled for many nights through corridors and along polished
stairways without finding a single librarian.
3
I repeat: it suffices that a book be possible for it to exist. Only the
impossible is excluded. For example: no book can be a ladder, although
no doubt there are books which discuss and negate and demonstrate this
possibility and others whose structure corresponds to that of a ladder.
4
Letizia Álvarez de Toledo has observed that this vast Library is
useless: rigorously speaking, a single volume would be sufficient,
a volume of ordinary format, printed in nine or ten point type, containing
an infinite number if infinitely thin leaves. (In the early seventeenth
century, Cavalieri said that all solid bodies are the superimposition of
an infinite number of planes.) The handling of this silky vade mecum would
not be convenient: each apparent page would unfold into other analogous
ones; the inconceivable middle page would have no reverse.
[If you liked this, you should consider
checking out some of the stuff over at The
Universe of Discourse, such as The
Zahir , Luis
Briceno y Confuerde de la Juemos: A Look Back and Adolfo
Bioy Cassares and the Real World. Also of possible interest would
be the HyperDiscordia
Reading Room. --Al]