Daily Borges quote: Infidels claim that the rule in the Library is not sense, but non-sense, 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 we can all 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?) -The Library of Babel
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 23:09:08 +0000
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