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 orpyramid 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.
SUMMARY
This is a first-person narrative text that describes the Library of Babel. The books are the basis for life for every individual in the library: interpreting the seemingly meaningless books is the occupation of many. Contained in the books are strings of letters that only great linguists (and wise oracles) can interpret. Of course, finding the one book that would explain all of the rest would make one an omnipotent God. On the other hand, for every one copy of the God book, there would be millions of near-perfect facsimiles, with only one or two words changed, but the whole meaning of the work reversed. This is quite an ambiguous story.
