Borges, "Ausencia"

A work ("Absence") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

Life's vastness I will have to praise,
Vast life which forms your mirror pane: 
With each dawn reconstructed life.
Since you left me and went away, 
So many places have seemed vain,
Bereft of meaning, yet alike 
To day's long beams of humdrum light. 

Those eves which were your carven niche, 
Those melodies which always held
Me there, words of that time awake, 
With my hands I will have to break. 
Where deeply will I hide my soul
So that your absence it won't see, 
That terrible, unsetting sun, 
Aflame for harsh eternity? 

Your absence so surrounds me whole, 
Just like a rope upon my throat, 
The sea in which we sink, and choke.

bré de levantar la vasta vida

que aún ahora es tu espejo:

cada mañana habré de reconstruirla.

Desde que te alejaste,

cuántos lugares se han tornado vanos

y sin sentido, iguales

a luces en el día.

Tardes que fueron nicho de tu imagen,

músicas en que siempre me aguardabas,

palabras de aquel tiempo,

yo tendré que quebrarlas con mis manos.

¿En qué hondonada esconderé mi alma

para que no vea tu ausencia

que como un sol terrible, sin ocaso,

brilla definitiva y despiadada?

Tu ausencia me rodea

como la cuerda a la garganta,

el mar al que se hunde.

La espera

A short story ("The Wait") by this Argentine writer.  You can read the original here.

The car dropped him off at 404 of that street in the Northeast. It was not yet nine in the morning; the man surveyed approvingly the stained banana trees each surrounded by a square meter of land, the decent, cylindrical houses, the contiguous pharmacy, the faded diamonds of the paint and hardware stores. A large blind hospital wall sealed off the front sidewalk; in a few greenhouses farther away the sun shimmered. The man thought that these things (now arbitrary and casual in whatever order, like the things we see in dreams) in time would become, if God so desired, invariable, necessary, and familiar. In the pharmacy window one could read the letters of the cookware: Breslauer; the Jews were replacing the Italians who had replaced the creoles. It was better that way; the man preferred not to socialize with persons of his blood. 

The driver helped him unload his luggage. The door was finally opened by a woman with a distracted and tired air about her. Perched in his seat the driver returned one of the coins, a Uruguayan twenty-piece which had been in his pocket since that night in the Hotel de Melo. The man handed him forty centavos, and as he did so, came to think the following: I have the burden of behaving in such a way that everyone forgets about me. I have committed two errors: I gave him a foreign coin and let him notice that I cared about such a mistake.

Preceded by the woman he crossed the hallway and the first courtyard. The room that they had reserved for him gave onto, happily enough, the second courtyard. The bed was iron, deformed by artifice into fantastic curves depicting figures and vines; around it were an old wardrobe made of pine, a bedside table, a bookshelf that reached the floor, two unmatched chairs, a sink and washbowl, as well as its pitcher, its soap dish, and a bottle of clouded glass. A map of the province of Buenos Aires and a crucifix adorned the walls; the wallpaper was crimson with countless large royal peacocks in perfect, almost military lines. The only door gave onto the courtyard. The chairs had to be rearranged to make room for the luggage. All of this was approved by the tenant. When the woman asked him his name, he responded Villari, not as a secret challenge, nor so as to mitigate the humiliation which, in truth, he did not feel; but because the name worked, because it was impossible to think of another. The literary error of imagining or assuming the name of the enemy certainly did not appeal to him as a potential ruse.

At first Mr. Villari did not leave the house; finally, after several weeks, he went out for a spell at dusk. One night he went into the cinema three blocks away. He never took a seat in the back row; he always got up a little before the end of the performance. He saw tragic tales of the underworld; these, undoubtedly, had their fair share of inaccuracies; these, undoubtedly, included images which had also figured in his previous life. Villari did not notice them because to him the notion of any coincidence between art and reality was quite alien. Tamely he tried to make himself like things; he so wanted to move ahead with the intentions they showed him. But in contrast to readers of novels, he could never see himself as a fictional character. 

He never received a letter not even a circular, but would read with faded hope one of the sections of the daily paper. In the evening he would push one of the chairs against the door and drink maté ferociously, his eyes pinned to the creeper on the wall of the neighboring high-rise. Years of solitude had taught him that the days in his memory had to be equal; yet there was no day, not even in prison or a hospital, that would not bring unexpectedness, that against the light would not resolve into a web of small surprises. In other periods of confinement he had succumbed to the temptation of counting the days and hours, but this seclusion was different because it was endless – apart from one morning when the daily carried the story of the death of Alejandro Villari. It was also possible that Villari had died and that this life was but a dream. This possibility disquieted him because he had not made up his mind whether this fact was a relief or a misfortune; at length he dismissed it as absurd. In bygone days, less distant owing to the course of time than to two or three irrevocable acts, he had desired many things with unscrupulous lust; this powerful drive had provoked the hatred of men and the love of a certain woman. But now he no longer wanted anything in particular: he only wanted to persist and not to end. The smell of maté and black tobacco, the growing thread of shadow that had encroached upon the courtyard – these were stimulants enough.

In the house there was a wolf dog, already old. Villari befriended him. He spoke to him in Spanish, in Italian, in the few words he had retained of his childhood’s rustic dialect. Villari tried to live in the mere present without memories or predictions; the latter were of less import than the former. He obscurely believed himself to have intuited that the past was the substance of which time was made; for that reason did time immediately become the past. His fatigue on some days seemed to resemble happiness; at moments like these there was little more complex than the dog.

One night a flash of unshakeable pain in the back of his mouth left him scared and trembling. This horrible miracle recurred every few minutes until dawn. The following day Villari sent for a car to take him to a dentist in the Once district. Here they pulled his molars; in such a trance he was no calmer or more cowardly than anyone else. 

Another night, coming back from the cinema, he felt like he was being pushed. In anger and indignation, as well as secret relief, he turned to face his offender. At him Villari spat a vulgar epithet; astonished, the other stammered in apology. He was a tall young man, dark-skinned, accompanied by a German-looking woman; that night Villari repeated to himself that he did not know them. Nevertheless four or five days would pass before he went out again. 

Among the bookshelf's contents was a copy of The Divine Comedy with Andreoli's old commentary. Urged on less by curiosity than by a feeling of obligation, Villari threw himself into reading this masterpiece. Before eating he would read a canto and then, in rigorous order, the notes. He did not deem the infernal punishments implausible or excessive, nor did he think that Dante had condemned him to the last circle of hell where the teeth of Ugolino gnawed endlessly upon Ruggieri's neck.

The royal peacocks of the crimson wallpaper seemed destined to nourish pressing and tenacious nightmares, but Mr. Villari never dreamed of a monstrous roundabout made of inextricable living birds. At daybreak he would languish in a dream of constant depth but varying circumstances. Two men and Villari entered with revolvers into the room or attacked him as he left the cinema; or all three at once were the stranger who had pushed him; or they waited sadly in the courtyard and seemed not to know him at all. At the end of the dream, he pulled the revolver out of a drawer of the bedside table (where, as it were, there indeed lay a revolver) and fired it at the men. The weapon's resonance would wake him up; but it was always a dream. And in another dream the attack would be repeated and in another dream he would have to kill them all.

One gloomy July morning he was woken up by the presence of unknown people (not the noise of their opening the door). Tall in the room's shadows, curiously simplified in the semidarkness (they had always been so much clearer in those fearful dreams), vigilant, unmoving, and patient, their eyes lowered as if curved by the weight of their weapons, Alejandro Villari and a stranger had finally reached him. In a dream he begged them to wait and turned towards the wall as if he were going back to sleep. Did he do this so as to provoke mercy in his slayers? Or because it is easier to bear a horrific occurrence than to imagine and keep it until the end of time? Or – and this was perhaps the most plausible explanation – to make the assassins into a dream, as they had been so many times, at the same place and time?

He was afloat in such magic when the shot erased him.

Axolotl

Probably the best-known short story about Mexican salamanders ("Axolotls"), the work of this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

There was a time when I used to think quite often about axolotls. I would go see them in the aquarium of the Jardin des Plantes and remain transfixed for hours; I would watch them either unmoving or moving darkly. Now I too am an axolotl.

Chance led me to them one spring morning. Paris was opening its peacock tail after a slow hibernation and I went down towards the Boulevard Port-Royal, took St. Marcel and L'Hôpital, espied the green among so much grey and remembered the lions. I was a great admirer of lions and panthers, yet I had never entered into the dark humid building that housed the aquariums. I propped up my bicycle against the railing and went to look at the tulips. The lions were ugly and sad and my panther was asleep. So I opted for the aquariums and avoided some vulgar-looking fish until, unexpectedly, I came face-to-face with the axolotls. I stood there for an hour gazing at them then left, incapable of anything else.

At the Saint-Geneviève library I consulted a dictionary and learned that axolotls are larval forms, outfitted with gills, of a species of batrachia of the genus ambystoma. That they were Mexican was clear to me from their small pink Aztec faces and the sign above the aquarium. I read that specimens had been found in Africa capable of living on land during periods of drought and which continued their life in the water once the rainy season set in. I also discovered their Spanish name, ajolote, that they were edible, and that their oil was used (it might no longer be used) like cod liver oil.

I had no desire to consult specialized works; instead, I returned to the Jardin des Plantes the following day. I began going every morning, sometimes both in the morning and evening. The aquarium custodian would smile at me somewhat perplexed as he took my ticket. I would lean against the iron bar that encased the aquariums and begin my study. There was nothing strange in all this because from the first moment on I understood that we were linked, that something infinitely lost and distant continued to unite us all the same.  I had already had my fill that first morning in front of the glass when a few bubbles scampered to the surface. The axolotls crowded together in the aquarium's narrow, miserable floor (I alone could tell how just how narrow and miserable) of stone and moss. There were some new specimens, and most of them leaned their heads against the glass, looking with their eyes of gold at their surrounders. Disturbed, almost ashamed, I felt a certain impudence in these silent, unmoving figures gathered at the bottom of the aquarium. I mentally isolated one of them situated on the right, somewhat separate from the rest, so as to examine it more closely. What I saw was a little pink, almost translucent body (I thought of those small Chinese statues made of milky glass) not unlike that of a lizard of fifteen centimeters with a fish's tail of extraordinary delicateness – the most sensitive part of our body. Along its back ran a transparent fin fused to its tail. But what I obsessed about were its incomparably fine legs ending in tiny digits and minutely human nails. And then I came across its eyes and face. Its face was inexpressive with no other trait apart from eyes, two orifices like pinheads entirely of transparent gold, lacking all life but looking, allowing themselves to be penetrated by my gaze – my gaze that seemed to pass through that golden point and vanish in an interior diaphanous mystery. The most slender of black halos bordered its eye, engraved into its pink flesh, into its head's pink and vaguely triangular stone, albeit with round and irregular sides. All this lent it a striking resemblance to a statue corroded by time. Its mouth was concealed by the triangular plane of the face; only at a profile could its considerable size be detected, and from the front a fine crack faintly traced a lifeless stone. On both sides of the head, where the ears would have been, three red veins sprang out like coral, a vegetal growth; the gills, I assumed. And, as it were, the only living thing about it. Every ten or fifteen seconds the veins would be seized with rigid tension, then return to a more relaxed appearance. Once in a while a leg would twitch ever so slightly; I could see the tiny toes steadying themselves in the moss. That which we do not like moves us greatly, and that aquarium was so mean and miserable ... No sooner did we step forward a bit then we would fall into a queue or ram heads with one another. There were difficulties, fights, fatigue. The time felt less oppressive when we were all still.

It was precisely this stillness that made me lean over in fascination the first time I caught sight of the axolotls. I had a dim comprehension of their secret will, of abolishing time and space through indifferent immobility. Then I learned more: the contraction of their gills, the probing of their tiny legs in the stone, and the sudden swimming (some of them swam by simply undulating their bodies) all showed me that they were quite capable of escaping this mineral stupor in which they spent countless hours. More than anything, their eyes were my obsession. Near them in the neighboring aquariums, a few fish gazed at me with the simple stupidity of their beautiful eyes quite similar to ours. But the eyes of the axolotls spoke of the presence of a different life, of another way of looking. Pressing my face to the glass (sometimes, the custodian would cough worriedly) I tried to get a better view of those tiny golden points, that entrance into a world infinitely slow and remote from these pink creatures. It was useless to tap the glass with my finger right in front of their faces: they would never have emitted the slightest reaction. Those eyes of gold continued to burn in their sweet and terrible light; they continued looking at me from an unfathomable depth that gave me vertigo.

And nevertheless they were near. This I knew before, before I became an axolotl. This I knew the day I approached them that first time. As opposed to what most people think, the anthropomorphic features of a monkey reveal the distance between them and us. The axolotls' absolute lack of any resemblance to human beings demonstrated that this recognition was valid, that I was not relying on easy analogies. Only the little hands ... But lizards also had hands like that, and they resemble us in no way. I think that it is the head of the axolotl, this pink triangular form with its small golden eyes. It saw and knew. It demanded. They were not animals.

It seemed simple, almost obvious, to turn to mythology. In the axolotls I began seeing a metamorphosis that was unable to erase a mysterious humanity. I imagined them conscious, slaves to their bodies, infinitely condemned to an abysmal silence, to desperate reflection. Their blind gaze, the tiny yet terrible disc of inexpressive gold, yielded a message: "Save us. Save us." Surprisingly I found myself mumbling words of advice, instilling childish hopes. They continued looking at me but did not move; soon enough the gills' pink veins became rigid. At that moment I felt something like dull pain; perhaps they could see me; perhaps they noticed my effort to penetrate into the impenetrable of their lives. They were not human beings, but in no animal had I ever encountered such a profound relationship. The axolotls were like witnesses to something, and at times like horrible judges; I felt ignoble before them. There was such a frightening purity in those transparent eyes. They were larvae, but larva also meant mask as well as ghost. Behind those Aztec faces, inexpressive and yet of implacable cruelty, what image awaited its hour? 

I feared them. I think that if I hadn't sensed the proximity of the other visitors and the custodian, I would not have dared to remain alone with them. "You're eating them with your eyes," the custodian said with a laugh – he must have thought me a bit unbalanced. But he didn't realize that it was they who were devouring me, slowly, with their eyes, in a cannibalism of gold. Far from the aquarium I did nothing more than think of them; it was as if they were influencing me from a distance. I came by every day, and at night I imagined them unmoving in the darkness, slowly moving one hand that soon enough encountered another hand. Perhaps their eyes could see in complete darkness and the day continued for them indefinitely. Axolotls' eyes had no lids. 

Now I know that there was nothing odd, that this had to occur. Every morning as I leaned towards the aquarium, the recognition was greater. They were suffering; every fiber of my body perceived this muffled suffering, this rigid torture at the bottom of the water. They were spying on something, a remote annihilated dominion, a time of liberty in which the world had belonged to the axolotls. It was not possible that an expression that terrible, able as it was to overcome the forced inexpressiveness of their stone features, did not bear a message of pain, the proof of eternal damnation, of this liquid inferno that afflicted them. I uselessly sought to prove to myself that my own sensitivity was projecting into the axolotls an inexistent consciousness. They and I both knew. For that reason there was nothing strange, nothing odd in what occurred. My face was pressed up against the aquarium glass, my eyes trying one more time to penetrate the mystery of those eyes of gold bereft of iris or pupil. I looked from very close at the face of an unmoving axolotl right by the glass. Without transition, without surprise, I saw my own face in the glass; instead of the axolotl I saw my own face in the glass, I saw it outside the aquarium, I saw it on the glass's other side. Then my face moved away and I understood.

Only one thing was strange: thinking like I did before, knowing. This realization was intially akin to the horror of someone buried alive who awakes to his destiny. Outside, my face came back and approached the glass. Here I saw my mouth and its lips pressed tight in an effort to understand the axolotl. I was an axolotl and now knew instantaneously that no comprehension was possible. It was beyond the aquarium; its thoughts were thoughts beyond the aquarium. Knowing that and being the same, I too was an axolotl and was in my own world. The horror came – I knew it that very moment – from having made myself a prisoner in the body of an axolotl, transmigrating into that body with the thoughts of a man, being buried alive in an axolotl, damned to moving lucidly among insensitive creatures. But all this stopped when a leg brushed against my face; when barely moving to the side I saw an axolotl next to me, watching me; and I knew that it knew as well, without any possible communication but yet so clear. Or perhaps I also was in it, or perhaps all of us thought like a man, incapable of expression, limited to the golden shining of our eyes which gazed upon the face of the man pressed up against the glass. 

He returned many times thereafter, but comes less often now. Weeks pass without his dropping in. Yesterday I saw him, and he looked at me for a long while then left abruptly. I had the impression he took little interest in all of us, that he was obeying a custom. Since the only thing I do is think, I was able to think about him a lot. It occurs to me that, in the beginning, we continued to communicate, that he felt more than ever united in a mystery over which he obsessed. But the bridges between him and me were short, because what was once his obsession is now an axolotl, alien to the life of man. I think that, in the beginning, I was capable of becoming this he again to a certain extent – ah, only to a certain extent – and sustain his desire of getting to know each other better. Now I am definitely an axolotl, and if I think like a man it is only because every axolotl thinks like a man within his image of pink stone. I also think that in all this I managed to communicate something to him those last days, when I was still he. And in this last solitude to which he no longer returns, it consoles me to think that perhaps he will write about us. That, believing he is imagining a story, he will write everything about axolotls.

Vallejo, "Heces"

A work ("Sediment") by this Peruvian poet.  You can read the original here.

No evening's rain has been like this; 
And life, my heart, has little aim.  
Is sweetest eve therefore to blame?
Of grace and grief, a woman's kiss? 

This evening Lima rains, while I  
Recall ungrateful, cruel caves;  
My block of poppy-crushing ice    
Shall best her words that wish my change.

My black and violent buds; the vast     
Stone hail; the glacial distance roils; 
Her calm, so dignified, has cast              
A final point in burning oils.  

As ne'er before this eve shall I,
With heart and owl, defy the rain;   
As others pass and see me wane,  
And take a part of you that hides 
Amidst my brow's deep wrinkled pain.   

Few evenings' rain have been like now; 
And life, my heart, has slipped somehow.  

La Biblioteca de Babel

A story ("The Library of Babel") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

The universe (what others call the Library) consists of an indefinite, perhaps even infinite number, of hexagonal galleries with vast ventilation shafts at the center surrounded by the lowest of handrails. From any of these hexagons the lower and upper floors can be seen – interminably. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves to a side, cover all the sides save two; their height, which is that of the floors, barely exceeds that of a normal library shelf. One of its free sides gives onto a narrow corridor which disembogues into another gallery identical to the first and to them all. On the left and the right of the corridor there are two miniscule offices. One allows for sleep standing up; the other satisfies your calls of nature. Here passes the spiral staircase which sinks and rises towards the remote distance. In the corridor there is a mirror that faithfully duplicates appearances. Men tend to infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (and if it were really so, what would be the point of this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that the burnished surfaces shape and promise the infinite ...  Light emanates from one of those spherical fruits which bear the name of light bulb. There are two in every hexagon – transverse. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant. 

Like all the men of the Library, I traveled during my youth. I pilgrimaged in search of a book, perhaps a catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can almost no longer decipher what I write, I am preparing myself to die but a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Dead, there will be no lack of pious hands that will carry me along the guardrail; my tomb shall be the unfathomable air; my body will plummet a long distance and disintegrate and dissolve in the wind engendered by the fall, a fall that is infinite. I affirm that the Library is interminable. Idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (Mystics claim that mystic ecstasy reveals to them a circular room with a large book with a continual spine that is turned towards all the walls.  But their testimony is suspicious, their words obscure: this circular book is God.) It is enough for me, for now, to repeat the classical report: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is some hexagon, whose circumference is inaccessible.

Five shelves correspond to each one of the walls of each hexagon; each shelf incorporates thirty-two books of the same format; each book has four hundred ten pages; each page has forty lines; each line has some eighty letters of black color. There are also letters on the back of every book; these letters neither indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know this disconnect sometimes seemed mysterious. Before I summarize the solution (whose discovery, despite its tragic projections, is perhaps the main chapter of the story) I would like to recur to certain axioms. 

The first: the Library has existed ab aeterno – from the beginning of time. Of this truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, no reasonable mind could have any doubts. Man, that imperfect librarian, could be the work of chance or of malevolent demiurges; the universe with its elegant allocation of shelves, of enigmatic tomes, of indefatigable staircases for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god. To perceive the distance that persists between the divine and the human, it is sufficient to compare these rude tremulous symbols which my fallible hand scribbled on the cover of a book, with the organic letters of its inside: punctual, delicate, utterly black, inimitably symmetrical.

The second: the number of orthographic symbols is twenty-five.* This verification permitted, three hundred years ago, the formulation of a general theory of the Library and the satisfactory resolution of a problem which no conjecture had ever deciphered: the formless and chaotic naturalness of almost all the books. One, which my father saw in a hexagon of circuit fifteen ninety-four, consisted of the letters M C V perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (very often consulted in this zone) is a mere labyrinth of letters; but the ultimate page says Oh time, your pyramids. It is already known: for every reasonable line or honest piece of news there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal farragoes and incoherencies. (I know of a wild, unbroken region whose librarians repudiate the superstitious and vain custom of searching for meaning in books and outfitted their library so that one might look in dreams or the chaotic lines of the hand ...  They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is by chance and the books have no meaning in and of themselves. This report, we will soon see, is not completely false ...)

For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books corresponded to past or remote languages. It is true that more ancient men, those first librarians, employed a language quite different from that which we speak today; it is likewise true that a few miles to the right the language is dialectic and ninety floors up it is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true; but four hundred and ten pages of unchanging M-C-Vs cannot correspond to any language, however dialectic or rudimentary it may be. Some insinuate that every letter was able to influence the subsequent letter, and that the value of M C V in the third line of page seventy-one was not a language which could sustain the same series on another position of the page, but this thesis did not prosper. Others thought of cryptography; this conjecture was universally accepted, although not in the sense in which it was formulated by its inventors.

Five hundred years ago the head of an upper hexagon** came upon a book as confused as the others, but which had almost two pages of homogenous lines. He showed his find to a roaming decipherer who told him that these lines were in Portuguese; others told him they were in Yiddish. Before a century had passed, the language had been established: a Samoyedic-Lithuanian dialect of Guaraní with inflections from classical Arabic. The contents were likewise deciphered: notions of combinatory analysis illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These examples permitted a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker observed that all the books, however diverse they may be, consisted of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He then alleged a fact that all the travelers had confirmed: there did not exist, in the vast Library, two identical books. From these incontrovertible presumptions he deduced that the Library was whole and that its shelves recorded all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographic symbols (a number that, although enormous, was not infinite) or perhaps everything which it was convenient to express – in every language. Everything: the meticulous and detailed history of the future; the autobiographies of the archangels; the faithful catalogue of the Library; thousands and thousands of false catalogues; the demonstration of the falsity of these catalogues; the demonstration of the falsity of the true catalogue; the Gnostic gospel of Basilides; the commentary on this gospel; the true account of your death; the version of every book in all the books; the treatise that Bede could have written (and did not write) on the mythology of the Saxons; the lost books of Tacitus.

When it was declared that the Library spanned all books, the first impression was of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or global problem whose eloquent solution did not exist – in some hexagon. The universe was justified; the universe brusquely usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time there was much talk about the Vindications: books of prophecy and apology, which forever vindicated the acts of every man in the universe and guarded the prodigious mysteries of his future. Thousands of covetous persons abandoned the sweet hexagon of their birth and sped up staircases, urged on by the vain proposition of encountering their Vindication. These pilgrims argued in the narrow hallways, cast obscure curses, strangled one another on the divine staircases, hurled deceptive books to the bottom of tunnels, and died from having been thrown off cliffs by men in remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons from the future, persons who are perhaps not imaginary); but the seekers did not remember that the possibility of a man encountering his own Vindication, or some perfidious variation of his own, is computable at zero.

Thus an explanation of the basic mysteries of the universe was also hoped for: the origin of the Library and of time. It is plausible that these solemn mysteries can be explained in words: if the language of the philosophers does not suffice, the multiform Library might have produced the unprecedented language required as well as the grammars and vocabularies of this language. The hexagons have fatigued men for four centuries ... There are official seekers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the fulfillment of their function: they always arrive exhausted; they speak of a staircase without steps that almost killed them; they speak of galleries and staircases with the librarian; occasionally they take up the nearest book and leaf through it in seach of infamous words. Visibly, no one expects to find anything.

Unbridled hope was followed, as is natural, by excessive depression. The certitude that one shelf in one hexagon contained precious books, and that these precious books were inaccessible, seemed almost unbearable. One blasphemous sect suggested that the searches should end and everyone should shuffle letters and symbols until they construct, through an improbable gift of chance, these canonical books. The authorities saw themselves obligated to promulgate strict orders. The sect disappeared, but in my childhood I saw old men hiding for long periods of time in the latrines, with metal discs in a prohibited beaker, feebly mimicking the divine disorder.

Others, inversely, believed it was paramount to eliminate the useless works. They invaded the hexagons, showed credentials that were not always false, leafed with annoyance through a volume and condemned whole shelves: to their hygienic and ascetic furor we owe the senseless loss of millions of books. Their name has been execrated, but some deplore the "treasures" which their frenzy destroyed, neglecting the notorious facts. One: the Library is so enormous that all reduction of human origin turns out to be infinitesimal. Another: every exemplar is unique, irreplaceable, but (as the Library is whole) there are always many hundreds of thousands of imperfect facsimiles: works that do not differ apart from a letter or comma. Contrary to public opinion, I dare to suppose that the consequences of the depredations committed by the Purifiers have been exaggerated by the horror that these fanatics provoked. They were spurred on by the delirium of conquering the books of the Crimson Hexagon: books of a lesser format than the natural books; omnipotent, illustrated and magical.

We also know of another superstition of that time: that of the Man of the Book. On some shelf of some hexagon (men reasoned) there ought to exist a book that may be the perfect cipher and compendium to all the rest: a certain librarian went through it and he has become analogous to a god. In the language of this zone there still persist vestiges of the cult of this remote functionary. Many have pilgrimaged in search of Him. For a century the most diverse routes were pursued in vain. How could one locate the venerated secret hexagon which accommodated the book? Someone proposed a regressive method: in order to locate book A, one would first need to consult book B which would indicate the site; in order to locate book B, one would first need to consult book C, and so forth for infinity ... It is to adventures like these that I have consecrated my years, with them now consumed. It does not seem implausible to me that on some shelf of the universe there might be a total book***; I beg those unknown gods to have one man – a single man, even if he lived thousands of years ago! – read the book. If this honor and this wisdom and this happiness are not to be mine, may they be others'. May the heavens exist even if my place be in hell. May I be outraged and annihilated, but may in an instant, in a being, Your enormous library be justified.

The impious affirm that such nonsense is normal in the Library and that the reasonable (which is also pure and humble coincidence) is an almost miraculous exception. They speak (I know) of the 'febrile Library, whose hazardous volumes run the unending risk of changing into others, and affirm everything, deny everything, and confuse everything like a divinity who is raving.' These words do not simply denounce the disorder, they also exemplify it and notoriously prove their appalling taste and desperate ignorance. In effect, the Library includes all the variations which the twenty-five orthographic symbols permit, but not a single absolutely foolish act. It serves no purpose to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons which I administer is called Combed thunder; another The cramp of plaster; yet another Axaxaxas mlö.  These propositions, at first blush incoherent, are doubtless capable of a cryptographic or allegorical justification; this justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, is already part of the Library. I cannot combine certain characters

dhcmrlchtdj

which the divine Library might not have foreseen and which do not, in any of its secret languages, entail a terrible meaning. No one can pronounce a syllable that is not filled with tendernesses and fears, that is not the powerful name of a god in one of those languages. To speak is to incur tautologies. This useless and verbose epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves of one of the uncountable hexagons – as does its refutation. (A number n of possible languages uses the same vocabulary; in some, the symbol library admits the proper definition: ubiquitous and everlasting system of hexagonal galleries. But library is bread or pyramid or some other things, and the seven words which define it have another value. You, my reader, are you sure you understand my language?)

Methodical writing distracts me from the present condition of men. The certitude that everything has been written annuls or haunts us. I know districts in which young people prostrate themselves before books and barbarically kiss their pages, yet they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical discords, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, all of these have decimated the population.  I believe I have already mentioned the suicides, more frequent every year. Perhaps I am deceived by fear and old age, but I suspect that the human species – the only one – is about to make itself extinct and that the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly immobile, armed with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.

I have just written infinite. I have not interpolated this adjective out of rhetorical custom;  I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who deem it limited postulate that in remote places the corridors, staircases and hexagons will for us inconceivably cease to be – which is absurd. Those that imagine the world without limits forget that it contains the possible number of books. I dare to insinuate this solution of the ancient problem: the library is unlimited and periodic. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in a given direction, he would prove, at the end of the centuries, that the same volumes repeat in the same disorder (which, I repeat, may be an order: the Order). My solitude is lightened by this elegant hope.****

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* The original manuscript does not contain figures or uppercase letters. Punctuation has been limited to the comma and the period. Those two signs, the space and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet are the twenty-five symbols sufficient to enumerate the unknown. (Editor's note.)

** Previously, for every three hexagons there used to be one person. Suicide and pulmonary diseases destroyed this proportion. A memory of unspeakable melancholy: at times I have traveled for many nights through polished corridors and staircases without finding a single librarian.

*** I repeat: it is sufficient that a book be possible for it to exist. Only the impossible is excluded. For example: no book is also a staircase, although there are doubtless books which challenge and deny and demonstrate this possibility, and others whose structure corresponds to that of a staircase.

**** Letizia Álvarez de Toledo has observed that the vast Library is useless; in all honesty, a single volume, in the typical format and printed in nine or ten sections consisting of an infinite number of infinitely thin pages, would suffice. (At the beginning of the seventeenth century Cavalieri said that every solid body was the superimposition of an infinite number of planes). Making use of this sleek vademecum would not be easy: each apparent page would double into other analogues, and the inconceivable central page would not have a reverse side.