The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel Read Online Free Page A

talk of The Vindications—books
of apologia and prophecies that would vindicate for all time the actions
of every person in the universe and that held wondrous arcana for men's
futures. Thousands of greedy individuals abandoned their sweet native hexagons
and rushed downstairs, upstairs, spurred by the vain desire to find their
Vindication. These pilgrims squabbled in the narrow corridors, muttered dark
imprecations, strangled one another on the divine staircases, threw deceiving
volumes down ventilation shafts, were themselves hurled to their deaths by men
of distant regions. Others went insane. . . . The Vindications do exist (I have
seen two of them, which refer to persons in the future, persons perhaps not
imaginary), but those who went in quest of them failed to recall that the
chance of a man's finding his own Vindication, or some perfidious version of
his own, can be calculated to be zero.
    At that same
period there was also hope that the fundamental mysteries of mankind—the origin
of the Library and of time—might be revealed. In all likelihood those profound
mysteries can indeed be explained in words; if the language of the philosophers
is not sufficient, then the multiform Library must surely have produced the
extraordinary language that is required, together with the words and grammar of
that language. For four centuries, men have been scouring the hexagons. . ..
There are official searchers, the "inquisitors." I have seen them
about their tasks: they arrive exhausted at some hexagon, they talk about a
staircase that nearly killed them—rungs were missing—they speak with the
librarian about galleries and staircases, and, once in a while, they take up
the nearest book and leaf through it, searching for disgraceful or dishonorable
words. Clearly, no one expects to discover anything.
    That
unbridled hopefulness was succeeded, naturally enough, by a similarly
disproportionate depression. The certainty that some bookshelf in some hexagon
contained precious books, yet that those precious books were forever out of
reach, was almost unbearable. One blasphemous sect proposed that the searches
be discontinued and that all men shuffle letters and symbols until those
canonical books, through some improbable stroke of chance, had been
constructed. The authorities were forced to issue strict orders. The sect
disappeared, but in my childhood I have seen old men who for long periods would
hide in the latrines with metal disks and a forbidden dice cup, feebly
mimicking the divine disorder.
    Others,
going about it in the opposite way, thought the first thing to do was eliminate
all worthless books. They would invade the hexagons, show credentials that were
not always false, leaf disgustedly through a volume, and condemn entire walls
of books. It is to their hygienic, ascetic rage that we lay the senseless loss
of millions of volumes. Their name is execrated today, but those who grieve
over the "treasures" destroyed in that frenzy overlook two widely
acknowledged facts: One, that the Library is so huge that any reduction by
human hands must be infinitesimal. And two, that each book is unique and
irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several
hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles—books that differ by no more than a
single letter, or a comma. Despite general opinion, I daresay that the
consequences of the depredations committed by the Purifiers have been
exaggerated by the horror those same fanatics inspired. They were spurred on by
the holy zeal to reach—someday, through unrelenting effort—the books of the
Crimson Hexagon—books smaller than natural books, books omnipotent,
illustrated, and magical.
    We also have
knowledge of another superstition from that period: belief in what was termed
the Book-Man. On some shelf in some hexagon, it was argued, there must exist a
book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books, and
some librarian must have examined that book; this librarian