“The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges
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.
2
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... read the full parable:
