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
Other Stories With Theme of Infinite Interpretation
Averroes'
Search (Summary)
The Garden of Forking Paths
(Summary)
The God's Script (Summary)
The Immortal (Summary)
The Library of Babel (Summary)
The Theologians (Summary)
Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (Summary)
Other Stories With Theme of Undefined Reality
The Circular Ruins
(Full Text)
The Circular Ruins (Summary)
The Immortal (Summary)
The Library of Babel (Summary)
The Lottery of Babylon (Summary)
The Secret Miracle
(Summary)
Theme of the Traitor and the
Hero (Summary)
The Waiting (Summary)
Criticism With Reference to this Story
Jonathan Meades
The Quest for
Borges
Michael Wood Borges’s
Surprise!
Carter Wheelock
Borges’ New
Prose