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
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.