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

is analogous to a
god. In the language of this zone there are still vestiges of the sect that
worshiped that distant librarian. Many have gone in search of Him. For a
hundred years, men beat every possible path—and every path in vain. How was one
to locate the idolized secret hexagon that sheltered Him? Someone proposed
searching by regression: To locate book A, first consult book B, which tells
where book A can be found; to locate book B, first consult book C, and so on,
to infinity. ... It is in ventures such as these that I have squandered and
spent my years. I cannot think it unlikely that there is such a total book 3 on some shelf in
the universe. I pray to the unknown gods that some man—even a single man, tens
of centuries ago—has perused and read that book. If the honor and wisdom and
joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let
heaven exist, though my own place be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered
and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy
enormous Library may find its justification.
    Infidels
claim that the rule in the Library is not "sense," but
"nonsense," and that "rationality" (even humble, pure
coherence) is an almost miraculous exception. They speak, I know, of "the
feverish Library, whose random volumes constantly threaten to transmogrify into
others, so that they affirm all things, deny all things, and confound and confuse
all things, like some mad and hallucinating deity." Those words, which not
only proclaim disorder but exemplify it as well, prove, as all can see, the
infidels' deplorable taste and desperate ignorance. For while the Library
contains all verbal structures, all the variations allowed by the twenty-five
orthographic symbols, it includes not a single absolute piece of nonsense. It
would be pointless to observe that the finest volume of all the many hexagons
that I myself administer is titled Combed Thunder, while another is
titled The Plaster Cramp, and another, Axaxaxas mlo. Those
phrases, at first apparently incoherent, are undoubtedly susceptible to
cryptographic or allegorical "reading"; that reading, that
justification of the words' order and existence, is itself verbal and, ex
hypothesi, already contained somewhere in the Library. There is no
combination of characters one can make —dhcmrlchtdj, for example—that the
divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues
does not hide a terrible significance. There is no syllable one can speak that
is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those
languages, the mighty name of a god. To speak is to commit tautologies. This
pointless, verbose epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the
five bookshelves in one of the countless hexagons—as does its refutation. (A
number n of the possible languages employ the same vocabulary; in some
of them, the symbol "library" possesses the correct definition
"everlasting, ubiquitous system of hexagonal galleries," while a
library—the thing—is a loaf of bread or a pyramid or something else, and the
six words that define it themselves have other definitions. You who read me—are
you certain you understand my language?)
    Methodical
composition distracts me from the present condition of humanity. The certainty
that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal. I
know districts in which the young people prostrate themselves before books and
like savages kiss their pages, though they cannot read a letter. Epidemics,
heretical discords, pilgrimages that inevitably degenerate into brigandage have
decimated the population. I believe I mentioned the suicides, which are more
and more frequent every year. I am perhaps misled by old age and fear, but I
suspect that the human species—the only species—teeters at the verge of
extinction, yet that the Library—enlightened, solitary, infinite, perfectly
unmoving, armed with precious volumes,