The Library of Babel
Jorge Luis Borges
By this art you may contemplate the variation 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
∞te
number of
al galleries,
with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.
From any of the
s 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 hallways 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
∞te (if it really were, why this
illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise
the
∞te… Light is provided by
some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two,
transversally placed, in each
. The light they emit
is insufficient, ∞incessant.
Like all men
of the Library, I have travelled 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
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 ∞te. I say that the
Library is ∞unending.
The idealists argue that the
al rooms are
a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of a space. They reason that a
ar
or
al room
is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a
ar chamber containing a
great
ar book, whose spine
is continuous and which follows the complete
of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. The cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice
now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a
whose exact center is any one of the
s and whose circumference is inaccessible.
There are five
shelves for each of the
’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. 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
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 on 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
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; another 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 variation in ∞unlimited repetition.
These examples made it possible for a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the
Library. The 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
∞te): in other words, all that it is given
to express, in all languages. Everything: the minutely
detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalog 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 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 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 elegant solution did not exist in some
. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly
ururped 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
s and rushed
up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in
the narrow corridors, proffered 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
s… 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
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 it was fundamental to eliminate useless works. They invaded the
s, 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 ∞esimal.
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
: 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
(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 exhausted in vain the most varied areas. How
could one locate the venerated and secret
which housed
Him? Someone proposed a regressive method: To locate book A, first consult
a book B which indicates A’s
position; to locate book B, consult first a book
C, and so on to ∞
… 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;
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
s 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
s—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
al 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 the
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,
∞te, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious
volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.
I have just written the word “∞te.”
I have not interpolated this adjective out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is not illogical to think
that the world is ∞te. Those who judge it to
be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and
s 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 the same volumes repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would
be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.