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sieve's storage 5yara 6veaa 7vxak The Library of Babel By Jorge Luis Borges The universe (which some call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, and maybe infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with vast ventilation wells in its center, surrounded by extremely low rails. From any hexagon, one sees the lower and upper floors: interminably. The distribution of galleries is invariable. Twenty bookshelves, in five long racks, cover all sides, except two; its height, that is of all floors, exceeds just that of a normal librarian. One of the free sides leads to a narrow entrance, following into another gallery, identical to the first and to all others. To the left and right of the entrance, there are two minuscule washrooms. One permits sleeping while standing; the other, relieving the physical necessities. There one finds the spiral stairs, that sinks into the abyss and heightens to infinity. In the entrance there is a mirror, that faithfully duplicates the appearances. The men have a habit of inferring from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it really were, what would these illusory copies be for?); I would rather dream that the polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite... The light is derived from some spherical fruits that are named lamps. There are two in each hexagon: transversal. The light they emit is insufficient, unceasing. Like all men of the Library, I journeyed in my youth, I travelled in search of a book, maybe the catalog of catalogs; now that my eyes can barely decypher what I write , I prepare myself to die, a few leagues away from the hexagon where I was born. Dead, there will not lack hands willing to throw me over the rails; my grave will be the unknowable air; my body will fall slowly and will be corrupted and dissolved by the fall, that is infinite. I affirm that the Library is interminable. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They argue a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics wish that ecstasy will reveal them a circular compartment with a great circular book of continuous spine, that follows around all the walls; but their testament is suspicious; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) It suffices, now, to repeat the classical precept: "the Library is a sphere of which the definitive center is any hexagon, of which the circumference is inaccessible". To each one of the walls of each hexagon correspond five bookshelves; each bookshelf holds thirty-two books of consistent form; each book has four hundred and ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, some eighty letters of black 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 this unconnection had, once, seemed mysterious. Before I synthetize the solution (of which the discovery, in spite of its tragic projections, is maybe the capital fact of the story), I want to refresh some axioms. The first: The Library exists ab aeterno . of this truth, of which its immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, no reasonable mind may doubt. The man, the imperfect librarian, may be the work of chance or of the malevolent demiurges; the universe, with its elegant providence of bookshelves; of enigmatic tomes, of untiring stairs for the traveller and of toilets for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god. To notice the distance there is between the divine and the earthly; it is enough to compare these trembling rude symbols, that my fallible hand sketches on the cover of a book, to the organic letters of the interior: punctual, delicate, extremely black, uncopiably symmetrical. The second: The number of orthographic symbols is twenty five. This confirmation permitted, after three hundred years, formulating a general theory of the Library and satisfiably solving the problem that no conjecture had decyphered: the chaotic and formless nature of nearly all books. One, that my father saw in the hexagon of circuit fifteen ninety-four, recounts the letters M C V perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another ( very often consulted in this field) is a simple labyrinth of letters, but the second to last page says O time your pyramids . It is already known: for a reasonable line or a correct information, there are leagues of insensible cacophonies, of verbal confusions and incoherences. (I know of a mountainous region of which the librarians reject the superstitious and vain habit of searching for meaning in the books and equipped it to that of searching it in dreams or in the chaotic lines of the hand... They admit that the creators of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they sustain that this application is casual and that the books themselves signify nothing. This rule, we will soon see, is not completely deceitful.) For a long time, it was believed that these impenetrable books corresponded to past or remote languages. It is true that the older men, the first librarians, spoke a language quite different from the one we speak now; it is true that a few miles to the right the language is dialectal and that ninety floors above it is incomprehensible. All of this, I repeat, is true, but four hundred and ten pages of unalterable M C V can not correspond to any language, as dialectal and rudimentary as it may be. Some insinuated that each letter affects the subsequent one and that the value of M C V in the third line of page 71 was not the one that could have the same series in another position of another page, , but this vague thesis did not prosper. Others thought about criptographies; universally this conjecture was accepted, even if not on the sense that its inventors formulated. Five hundred years ago, the chief of a superior hexagon � encountered a book as confusing as the others, however it possessed almost two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his finding to a travelling decypherer, who told him that they were written in Portuguese; others affirmed him it was in Yiddish. Before a century could go by the language could be established: a Samoyedo-lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with inflections from classic Arabic. The content was also dechypered: notions of combinatory analysis, illustrated by examples of variants with unlimited repetition. These examples permitted a genius librarian to discover the fundamental law of the library. This thinker observed that all the books, as diverse as they may be, present the same elements: the space, the stop, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also demonstrated a fact that all travellers confirmed: "there are not, in the Library, two identical books. Of these two uncontroversial premises it was deduced that the Library is total and its bookshelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-something orthographic symbols (a number, while extremely vast, not infinite), that is, everything that may be expressed: in all languages. Everything: The assiduous story of the future, the autobiographies of archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the demonstration of the fallacy of these catalogs, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalog, Basilides's gnostic gospel, the commentary of this gospel, the veritable account of your death, the versions of each books in all languages, the interpolations of each book in all books, the treaty that Beda could write (and did not write) about the Saxon's mythology, the lost books of Tacitus. When it was proclaimed that the Library retained all books, the first impression was of extravagant happiness. All the men felt themselves rulers of a secret and intact treasure. There was no personal or universal problem of which the eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was now justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. In that time it was very often spoken about the Vindications: defensive and prophetic books, that forever vindicated the action of each man in the universe and stored arcane prodigies for their future. Thousands of covetous men abandoned the sweet natal hexagon and rushed themselves to the stairs above , pressured by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims dueled in the narrow corridors, cast obscure curses, strangled themselves on the divine stairs, threw deceitful books to the ends of tunnels, died being toppled by men of remote regions. Others went mad... The Vindications do exist (I saw two that refer to people of the future, to people perhaps not imaginary), but the ones who searched did not remember that the possibility of a man finding his own, or some perfidious variant of his own, is computable in zero. Then the clarification of the basic mysteries of humankind were also waited for: the origin of the Library and of time. It is verisimilar that these serious mysteries could be explained in words: if the language of the philosophers does not suffice, The multiform Library will produce the inaudite language that is needed and the vocabularies and grammar of this language. It has been four centuries since the men started emptying the hexagons... There exist official investigators, inquisitors . I saw them exerting their function: they always come weary; they speak of a stairway with no steps that almost killed them; they speak of galleries and of stairs with the librarian; sometimes, they grab the nearest book and skim it, searching for infamous words. Visibly, no one hopes to find anything. To the unmeasured hope succeeded, as is natural, an excessive depression. The certainty that some shelf in some hexagon contained precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible appeared almost intolerable. A blasphemous cult suggested the cessation of the searches and that all the men should mix letters and symbols, until they have constructed, by an unlikely gift of chance, these canonical books. The authorities saw themselves forced to promulgate severe orders. The cult disappeared, but in my childhood I saw old men who slowly concealed themselves on the toilets, with some metal disks in a prohibited dicebox , and daftly imitated the divine disorder. Others, inversely, believed that it was primordial to eliminate the useless works. They would invade the hexagons, they would exhibit credentials that were not always false, they would skim a volume with distaste and condemn entire racks: to their hygienic, devoted fury, is due the insensible loss of millions of books. Their name is execrated, but those who lament the "treasures" destroyed by their frenzy ignore two notorious facts. One: the Library is so immense that any reduction of human origin results infinitesimal. Another: each specimen is unique, irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always hundreds of thousands