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<h2>Fiction</h2>
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<div class="card-title">"A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease"</div>
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<p class="card-text">Jonathan Safran Foer</p>
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<div class="card-title">"The Library of Babel"</div>
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<p class="card-text">Jorge Luis Borges</p>
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<div class="title">"A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease"
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<div class="author">Jonathan Safran Foer</div>
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<p>c The "silence mark" signifies an absence of language, and there is at least one on every page of the story of my family life. Most often used in the conversations I have with my grandmother about her life in Europe during the war, and in conversations with my father about our family's history of heart disease—we have forty-one heart attacks between us, and counting—the silence mark is a staple of familial punctuation. Note the use of silence in the following brief exchange, when my father called me at college, the morning of his most recent angioplasty:</p>
<p>"Listen," he said, and then surrendered to a long pause, as if the pause were what I was supposed to listen to. "I'm sure everything's gonna be fine, but I just wanted to let you know—" <br>"I already know," I said. <br>"c" <br>"c" <br>"c" <br>"c" <br>"O.K.," he said. <br>"I'll talk to you tonight," I said, and I could hear, in the receiver, my own heartbeat. <br>He said, "Yup."</p>
<hr>
<p>g The "willed silence mark" signifies an intentional silence, the conversational equivalent of building a wall over which you can't climb, through which you can't see, against which you break the bones of your hands and wrists. I often inflict willed silences upon my mother when she asks about my relationships with girls. Perhaps this is because I never have <span style="font-style: italic;">relationships</span> with girls—only <span style="font-style: italic;">relations</span>. It depresses me to think that I've never had sex with anyone who really loved me. Sometimes I wonder if having sex with a girl who doesn't love me is like felling a tree, alone, in a forest: no one hears about it; it didn't happen.</p>
<hr>
<p>?? The "insistent question mark" de notes one family member's refusal to yield to a willed silence, as in this conversation with my mother:</p>
<p>"Are you dating at all?" <br>"c" <br>"But you're seeing people, I'm sure. Right?" <br>"c" <br>"I don't get it. Are you ashamed of the girl? Are you ashamed of me?" <br>"g" <br>"??"</p>
<hr>
<p>¡ As it visually suggests, the "unxcla mation point" is the opposite of an exclamation point; it indicates a whisper.</p>
<p>The best example of this usage occurred when I was a boy. My grandmother was driving me to a piano lesson, and the Volvo's wipers only moved the rain around. She turned down the volume of the second side of the seventh tape of the audio version of "Shoah," put her hand on my cheek, and said, "I hope that you never love anyone as much as I love you¡"</p>
<p>Why was she whispering? We were the only ones who could hear.</p>
<hr>
<p>¡¡ Theoretically, the "extraunxclama tion points" would be used to denote twice an unxclamation point, but in practice any whisper that quiet would not be heard. I take comfort in believing that at least some of the silences in my life were really extraunxclamations.</p>
<hr>
<p>!! The "extraexclamation points" are simply twice an exclamation point. I've never had a heated argument with any member of my family. We've never yelled at each other, or disagreed with any passion. In fact, I can't even remember a difference of opinion. There are those who would say that this is unhealthy. But, since it is the case, there exists only one instance of extraexclamation points in our family history, and they were uttered by a stranger who was vying with my father for a parking space in front of the National Zoo.</p>
<p>"Give it up, fucker!!" he hollered at my father, in front of my mother, my brothers, and me. <br>"Well, I'm sorry," my father said, pushing the bridge of his glasses up his nose, "but I think it's rather obvious that we arrived at this space first. You see, we were approaching from—" <br>"Give . . . it . . . up . . . fucker!!" <br>"Well, it's just that I think I'm in the right on this particu—" <br>"GIVE IT UP, FUCKER!!" <br>"Give it up, Dad¡" I said, suffering a minor coronary event as my fingers clenched his seat's headrest. <br>"Je-sus!" the man yelled, pounding his fist against the outside of his car door. "Giveitupfucker!!" <br>Ultimately, my father gave it up, and we found a spot several blocks away. Before we got out, he pushed in the cigarette lighter, and we waited, in silence, as it got hot. When it popped out, he pushed it back in. "It's never, ever worth it," he said, turning back to us, his hand against his heart.</p>
<hr>
<p>~ Placed at the end of a sentence, the "pedal point" signifies a thought that dissolves into a suggestive silence. The pedal point is distinguished from the ellipsis and the dash in that the thought it follows is neither incomplete nor interrupted but an outstretched hand. My younger brother uses these a lot with me, probably because he, of all the members of my family, is the one most capable of telling me what he needs to tell me without having to say it. Or, rather, he's the one whose words I'm most convinced I don't need to hear. Very often he will say, "Jonathan~" and I will say, "I know."</p>
<p>A few weeks ago, he was having problems with his heart. A visit to his university's health center to check out some chest pains became a trip to the emergency room became a week in the intensive-care unit. As it turns out, he's been having one long heart attack for the last six years. "It's nowhere near as bad as it sounds," the doctor told my parents, "but it's definitely something we want to take care of."</p>
<p>I called my brother that night and told him that he shouldn't worry. He said, "I know. But that doesn't mean there's nothing to worry about~" <br>"I know~" I said. <br>"I know~" he said. <br>"I~" <br>"I~" <br>"c"</p>
<p>Does my little brother have relationships with girls? I don't know.</p>
<hr>
<p>Ø Another commonly employed familial punctuation mark, the "low point," is used either in place—or for accentuation at the end—of such phrases as "This is terrible," "This is irremediable," "It couldn't possibly be worse."</p>
<p>"It's good to have somebody, Jonathan. It's necessary." <br>"c" <br>"It pains me to think of you alone." <br>"gØ" <br>"??Ø"</p>
<p>Interestingly, low points always come in pairs in my family. That is, the acknowledgment of whatever is terrible and irremediable becomes itself something terrible and irremediable—and often worse than the original referent. For example, my sadness makes my mother sadder than the cause of my sadness does. Of course, her sadness then makes me sad. Thus is created a "low-point chain": ØØØØØ . . .·.</p>
<hr>
<p>d The "snowflake" is used at the end of a unique familial phrase—that is, any sequence of words that has never, in the history of our family life, been assembled as such. For example, "I didn't die in the Holocaust, but all of my siblings did, so where does that leave me?d" Or, "My heart is no good, and I'm afraid of dying, and I'm also afraid of saying I love you.d"</p>
<hr>
<p>J The "corroboration mark" is more or less what it looks like. But it would be a mistake to think that it simply stands in place of "He agreed," or even "Yes." Witness the subtle usage in this dialogue between my mother and my father: <p>"Could you add orange juice to the grocery list, but remember to get the kind with reduced acid. Also some cottage cheese. And that bacon-substitute stuff. And a few Yahrzeit candles." <br>"J" <br>"The car needs gas. I need tampons." <br>"J" <br>"Is Jonathan dating anyone? I'm not prying, but I'm very interested." <br>"J"</p>
<p>My father has suffered twenty-two heart attacks—more than the rest of us combined. Once, in a moment of frankness after his nineteenth, he told me that his marriage to my mother had been successful because he had become a yes-man early on.</p>
<p>"We've only had one fight," he said. "It was in our first week of marriage. I realized that it's never, ever worth it."</p>
<p>My father and I were pulling weeds one afternoon a few weeks ago. He was disobeying his cardiologist's order not to pull weeds. The problem, the doctor says, is not the physical exertion but the emotional stress that weeding inflicts on my father. He has dreams of weeds sprouting from his body, of having to pull them, at the roots, from his chest. He has also been told not to watch Orioles games and not to think about the current Administration.</p>
<p>As we weeded, my father made a joke about how my older brother, who, barring a fatal heart attack, was to get married in a few weeks, had already become a yes-man. Hearing this felt like having an elephant sit on my chest—my brother, whom I loved more than I loved myself, was surrendering.</p>
<p>"Your grandfather was a yes-man," my father added, on his knees, his fingers pushing into the earth, "and your children will be yes-men."</p>
<p>I've been thinking about that conversation ever since, and I've come to understand—with a straining heart—that I, too, am becoming a yes-man, and that, like my father's and my brother's, my surrender has little to do with the people I say yes to, or with the existence of questions at all. It has to do with a fear of dying, with rehearsal and preparation.</p>
<hr>
<p>"" The "severed web" is a Barely Tolerable Substitute, whose meaning approximates "I love you," and which can be used in place of "I love you." Other Barely Tolerable Substitutes include, but are not limited to:</p>
<p>Æ|¨, which approximates "I love you." <br>Oc, which approximates "I love you." <br>oe, which approximates "I love you." <br>r(, which approximates "I love you."</p>
<p>I don't know how many Barely Tolerable Substitutes there are, but often it feels as if they were everywhere, as if everything that is spoken and done—every "Yup," "O.K.," and "I already know," every weed pulled from the lawn, every sexual act—were just Barely Tolerable.</p>
<hr>
<p>:: Unlike the colon, which is used to mark a major division in a sentence, and to indicate that what follows is an elaboration, summation, implication, etc., of what precedes, the "reversible colon" is used when what appears on either side elaborates, summates, implicates, etc., what's on the other side. In other words, the two halves of the sentence explain each other, as in the cases of "Mother::Me," and "Father::Death." Here are some examples of reversible sentences:</p>
<p>My eyes water when I speak about my family::I don't like to speak about my family. <br>I've never felt loved by anyone outside of my family::my persistent depression. <br>1938 to 1945::c. <br>Sex::yes. <br>My grandmother's sadness::my mother's sadness::my sadness::the sadness that will come after me. <br>To be Jewish::to be Jewish. <br>Heart disease::yes.</p>
<hr>
<p>¨ Familial communication always has to do with failures to communicate. It is common that in the course of a conversation one of the participants will not hear something that the other has said. It is also quite common that one of the participants does not understand what the other has said. Somewhat less common is one participant's saying something whose words the other understands completely but whose meaning is not understood at all. This can happen with very simple sentences, like "I hope that you never love anyone as much as I love you¡"</p>
<p>But, in our best, least depressing moments, we <span style="font-style: italic;">try</span> to understand what we have failed to understand. A "backup" is used: we start again at the beginning, replaying what was missed, making the effort to express ourselves in a different, more direct way:</p>
<p>"It pains me to think of you alone." <br>"¨" <br>"It pains me to think of me without any grandchildren to love."</p>
<hr>
<p>{} A related set of marks, the "should-have brackets," signify words that were not spoken but should have been, as in this dialogue with my father:</p>
<p>"Are you hearing static?" <br>"{I'm crying into the phone.}" <br>"Jonathan?" <br>"c" <br>"Jonathan~" <br>"g" <br>"??" <br>"I::not myself~" <br>"{A child's sadness is a parent's sadness.}" <br>"{A parent's sadness is a child's sadness.}" <br>"¨" <br>"I'm probably just tired¡" <br>"{I never told you this, because I thought it might hurt you, but in my dreams it was <span style="font-style: italic;">you</span>. Not me. <span style="font-style: italic;">You</span> were pulling the weeds from my chest.}" <br>"{I want to love and be loved.}" <br>"J" <br>"J" <br>"Ø" <br>"Ø" <br>"oe" <br>"J" <br>"c´c´c" <br>"Ø" <br>"Ø" <br>":°9" <br>" g + g Æ g " <br>"J" <br>"Oc" <br>"÷''" <br>"·pv£u¢°ot§l" <br>"g" <br>"{I love you.}" <br>"{I love you, too. So much.}"</p>
<p>Of course, my sense of the should-have is unlikely to be the same as my brothers', or my mother's, or my father's. Sometimes—when I'm in the car, or having sex, or talking to one of them on the phone—I imagine their should-have versions. I sew them together into a new life, leaving out everything that actually happened and was said.</p>
<hr>
<p align="right"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20050113085833/www.newyorker.com/printable/?fiction/020610fi_fiction" target="_blank">.html</a></p>
</div>
</div>
<div class="container-text" id="typefaces">
<div class="title"> "About the Typefaces Not Used in This Edition"
</div>
<div class="author">Jonathan Safran Foer</div>
<div class="text"> <p>ELENA, 10 POINT: This typeface - conceived of by independent typographer Leopold Shunt, as the moon set on the final night of his wife's life - disintegrates over time. The more a word is used, the more it crumbles and fades - the harder it becomes to see. By the end of this book, utilitarian words like the, a and was would have been lost on the white page. Henry's recurrent joys and tortures - bathwater, collarbone, vulnerability, pillowcase, bridge - would have been ruins, unintentional monuments to bathwater, collarbone, vulnerability, pillowcase and bridge. And when the life of the book dwindled to a single page, as it now does, when you held your palm against the inside of the back cover, as if it were her damp forehead, as if you could will it to persevere past its end, God would have been nearly illegible, and I completely invisible. Had Elena been used, Henry's last words would have read:</p>
<hr>
<p>TACTIL, VARIABLE POINT: "A text should reveal the heart's emotional condition, as an EKG readout reveals its physical one." This idea was the inspiration for Basque typographer Clara Sevillo to create Tactil, a good example of the early interface types. The size of a letter corresponds to how hard the key is pressed. Air-conditioning blows its story over the keys, as does the breath of a bird on the sill, as does the moonlight whose infinitesimally small exertion also tells a tale. Even when there is nothing applying pressure to the keys, a text is still being generated - an invisible transcript of the world without witnesses. And if one were to hammer the keyboard with infinite force, an infinitely large nonsense word would be produced.</p>
<p>If this book had been typeset in Tactil, Henry's various I love yous could have been distinguished between narcissistic love ("<span style="font-style: italic;">I</span> love you"), love of love rather than love of another ("I <span style="font-style: italic;">love</span> you"), and traditional, romantic love ("I love <span style="font-style: italic;">you</span>"). We could have learned where Henry's heart leaned when on the unsafe wooden bridge he confessed himself to Sophy. And we could have learned if it is true that one can love only one thing at a time, making <span style="font-style: italic;">I love you</span> definitionally impossible.</p>
<p>Tactil was not used because preliminary calculations suggested that the author was striving - intentionally or not - to recreate the physical world. That is, tree was typed with the force to make the word as large as a tree. Pear, cumulus and Band-Aid typed to make the words to the scale of a pear, a cloud and a Band-Aid. To print the book in this way would have required bringing another world into existence, a twin world composed entirely of words. We finally would have known the sizes of those abstract ideas whose immeasurability makes us, time and time again, lose our bearings. How does existentialism compare to a tree? Orgasm to a pear? A good conversation to a cumulus cloud? The mending of a gnarled heart to a Band-Aid?</p>
<p>But even if logistics had permitted, this typeface still would have been rejected, because as a quantitative, rather than qualitative, measure, it could have been quite misleading, That is, Henry's love for Sophy may have been the size that it was because of hate, sympathy, jealousy, neediness or, however unlikely, love. We would never have known, only that there was much of it, which is to know very little.</p>
<hr>
<p>TRANS-1, 10 POINT: This typeface refreshes itself continuously on the screen, words being replaced by their synonyms. Now autumn begins exists only for long enough to bring present fall commences into existence, which instantly disappears to make room for gift descend embarks, which dies so that talent alight boards ship can live. Trans-1's creator, IS Bely (1972-), said that he hoped the typeface would illuminate the richness of language, the interconnectedness, the nuance of the web. But instead, Trans-1 reveals language's poverty, its inadequate approximations, how a web is made of holes, how the river of words flows always away from us.</p>
<hr>
<p>TRANS-2, 10 POINT: This typeface also refreshes continuously, but unlike Trans-1, words are replaced by their antonyms. Now autumn begins exists only for long enough to bring later spring ceases into existence, which instantly disappears to make room for presently dry riverbed persists, which dies so that never flowing water perishes can live. It was Bely's intention, with Trans-2, to illuminate the poverty of language, its inadequate approximations, how a web is made of holes. But instead, we see the string connecting those holes, and caught in the net is the shadow of meaning.</p>
<p>This typeface frequently freezes in place, fixed on words that cannot be refreshed. What, after all, is the opposite of God? The meaning is liberated from the words by the typeface's inability to translate them. These nonexistent antonyms are the reflections of the words we are looking for, the non-approximations, like watching a solar eclipse in a puddle. The antonym of God's non-existent antonym is closer to God than God will ever be. Which, then, brings us closer to what we want to communicate: saying what we intend, or trying to say the opposite?</p>
<hr>
<p>TRANS-3, 10 POINT: This typeface also refreshes continuously, but unlike Trans-1 and -2, words are replaced by themselves. Now autumn begins exists for only long enough to bring now autumn begins into existence, which instantly disapears to make room for now autumn begins which dies so that now autumn begins can live. A word, like a person, exists for exactly one moment in time. After that moment, only the letters - cells - are shared.</p>
<p>What autumn meant when uttered by Stephen Wren in Cincinnati at 10:32:34 on April 14, 2000, was quite different from what it meant one second later when he said it again, and was entirely unlike what it meant one hundred years before, or one thousand years before, or at the same moment, when cried by a palsied schoolgirl in Wales. This typeface tries to keep pace with language, to change as the world changes, but like chasing the long black cape of a fleeing dream, it will never catch up. Now autumn begins will never mean what it does, but what it did.</p>
<hr>
<p>AVIARY, VARIABLE POINT: One of the more unorthodox typefaces of the end of the twentieth century, Aviary relies on the migration of birds. The typesetter, who is preferably an ornithologist, tattoos each word onto the underside of a different bird's wing, according to its place in the flock. (The first word of this book, Elena, would have been tattooed onto the wing of the natural leader. The last word, free, onto the wing of the bird who carries the rear.) Alexander Dubovich, Aviary's creator, said his inspiration was a copy of Anna Karenina that fell from the shelf and landed spread, text-down, on the floor.</p>
<p>Among many other reasons, this typeface was not used because the order of birds in a flock shifts regularly. The natural leader never remains the leader, and the bird in the rear always moves forward. Also, Aviary is only coherent when the birds are in flight. When perched in trees, or collecting the thrown scraps from some kind park goer, or sleeping on the sills of high apartment windows, the birds are in disarray, and so would be the book. It could exist only in flight, only between places, only as a way to get from here to there. Or there to here.</p>
<hr>
<p>ICELAND, 22:13:36. APRIL 11, 2006, VARIABLE POINT: There are 237,983 words in this book. The same number of people were alive in Iceland at 22:13:36, April 11, 2006. The designer of this typeface, Bjorn Jaagern, devised to give each person a word to memorise, according to age. (The youngest citizen would be given Elena, the oldest free.) In an annual festival, the people of Iceland would line up, youngest to oldest, and recite the story of Henry's tragic love and loss, from beginning to end.</p>
<p>As citizens died, their roles in the recitation would be given to the youngest Icelander without a word, although the reading would still proceed from youngest to oldest. It was the hope of the citizens of Iceland that the book would cycle smoothly: from order to disorder, and back to order again. That is, Let our fathers and mothers die before their children, the old before the young.</p>
<p>Iceland, 22:13:36, April 11, 2006, was not used because life is full of early death, and fathers and mothers sometimes outlive their children. The editor's concern was not that the book would become a salad of meaning, but that hearing it once a year would be too painful a reminder that we are twigs alighted on a fence, that each of us is capable of experiencing not only Henry's great love, but also his loss. Should a child recite a word from the middle - from the scene in which Henry's brother stuffs up the cracks with wet towels, and loses his lashes in the oven - we would know that he or she replaced someone who died in middle-age, too soon, before making it to the end of the story.</p>
<hr>
<p>REAL TIME, REAL WORLD, TO SCALE: This typeface began organically, with the popularisation of e-mail. Such symbols as :) came to stand for those things that words couldn't quite get at. Over time, every idea had a corresponding symbol, not unlike the drawings from the dark caves of early man. These symbols approximated what a word described better than a word ever could. (A picture of a flower is closer to the flower it describes than flower is.)</p>
<p>The evolution continued. The typographical symbol for flower became a sketch of a flower, then an oil painting of a flower, then a photograph of a flower, then a sculpted flower, then a video of a flower, and is, now, a real-time real-world flower. Henry exists: he blinks, he inhales, he tells his older brother, I love you more now than I did before, he stammers, he sways, he begs, Sophy, believe in me, always.</p>
<p>This typeface was not used because of the fear that it would be popularised, that all books would be printed in real-time real-world, making it impossible to know whether we were living as autonomous beings, or characters in a story. When you read these words, for example, you would have to wonder whether you were the real-time real-world incarnation of someone in a story who was reading these words. You would wonder if you were not the you that you thought you were, if you were about to finish this book only because you were written to do so, because you had to.</p>
<p>Or perhaps, you think, it's otherwise. You approach this final sentence because you are you, your own you, living a life of your own creation. If you are a character, then you are the author. If you are a slave to your own weaknesses, then you are unconstrained. Perhaps you are completely free.</p>
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</div>
<div class="container-text" id="exactitude">
<div class="title"> "On Exactitude in Science"
</div>
<div class="author">Jorge Luis Borges</div>
<div class="text">
<p><span style="font-style: italic;">On Exactitude in Science...</span> In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.</p>
<p><span style="font-style: italic;">Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes,<br>Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658</span></p>
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<div class="container-text" id="babel">
<div class="title"> "The Library of Babel"
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<div class="author">Jorge Luis Borges</div>
<div class="text">
<p>By this art you may contemplate the variations of the 23 letters...<br><span style="font-style: italic;">The Anatomy of Melancholy, part 2, sect. II, mem. IV</span></p>
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<p style="text-indent: 50px;">The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite ... Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 50px;">Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The 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. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: <span style="font-style: italic;">The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.</span></p>
<p style="text-indent: 50px;">There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in 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 that this incoherence at one time seemed mysterious. Before summarizing the solution (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic projections, is perhaps the capital fact in history) I wish to recall a few axioms.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 50px;">First: The Library exists <span style="font-style: italic;">ab aeterno.</span> This truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, cannot be placed in doubt by any reasonable mind. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god. To perceive the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these crude wavering symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book, with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 50px;">Second: <span style="font-style: italic;">The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number.</span><a href="#footnote1" class="scroll" id="footnote1b"><sup>[1]</sup></a> This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and solve satisfactorily the problem which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books. One which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit fifteen ninety-four was made up of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (very much consulted in this area) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says <span style="font-style: italic;">Oh time thy pyramids.</span> This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's palm ... They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.)</p>
<p style="text-indent: 50px;">For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books corresponded to past or remote languages. It is true that the most ancient men, the first librarians, used a language quite different from the one we now speak; it is true that a few miles to the right the tongue is dialectical and that ninety floors farther up, it is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but four hundred and ten pages of inalterable MCV's cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be. Some insinuated that each letter could influence the following one and that the value of MCV in the third line of page 71 was not the one the same series may have in another position on another page, but this vague thesis did not prevail. Others thought of cryptographs; generally, this conjecture has been accepted, though not in the sense in which it was formulated by its originators.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 50px;">Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon<a href="#footnote2" class="scroll" id="footnote2b"><sup>[2]</sup></a> came upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of homogeneous lines. He showed his find to a wandering decoder who told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These examples made it possible for a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: <span style="font-style: italic;">In the vast Library there are no two identical books.</span> From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 50px;">When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 50px;">At that time it was also hoped that a clarification of humanity's basic mysteries -- the origin of the Library and of time -- might be found. It is verisimilar that these grave mysteries could be explained in words: if the language of philosophers is not sufficient, the multiform Library will have produced the unprecedented language required, with its vocabularies and grammars. For four centuries now men have exhausted the hexagons ... There are official searchers, <span style="font-style: italic;">inquisitors.</span> I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 50px;">As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression. The certitude that some shelf in some hexagon held precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible, seemed almost intolerable. A blasphemous sect suggested that the searches should cease and that all men should juggle letters and symbols until they constructed, by an improbable gift of chance, these canonical books. The authorities were obliged to issue severe orders. The sect disappeared, but in my childhood I have seen old men who, for long periods of time, would hide in the latrines with some metal disks in a forbidden dice cup and feebly mimic the divine disorder.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 50px;">Others, inversely, believed that it was fundamental to eliminate useless works. They invaded the hexagons, showed credentials which were not always false, leafed through a volume with displeasure and condemned whole shelves: their hygienic, ascetic furor caused the senseless perdition of millions of books. Their name is execrated, but those who deplore the ``treasures'' destroyed by this frenzy neglect two notable facts. One: the Library is so enormous that any reduction of human origin is infinitesimal. The other: every copy is unique, irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles: works which differ only in a letter or a comma. Counter to general opinion, I venture to suppose that the consequences of the Purifiers' depredations have been exaggerated by the horror these fanatics produced. They were urged on by the delirium of trying to reach the books in the Crimson Hexagon: books whose format is smaller than usual, all-powerful, illustrated and magical.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 50px;">We also know of another superstition of that time: that of the Man of the Book. On some shelf in some hexagon (men reasoned) there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium <span style="font-style: italic;">of all the rest:</span> some librarian has gone through it and he is analogous to a god. In the language of this zone vestiges of this remote functionary's cult still persist. Many wandered in search of Him. For a century they have exhausted in vain the most varied areas. How could one locate the venerated and secret hexagon which housed Him? Someone proposed a regressive method: To locate book A, consult first book B which indicates A's position; to locate book B, consult first a book C, and so on to infinity ... In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years. It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe;<a href="#footnote3" class="scroll" id="footnote3b"><sup>[3]</sup></a> I pray to the unknown gods that a man -- just one, even though it were thousands of years ago! -- may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified. The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library and that the reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception. They speak (I know) of the "feverish Library whose chance volumes are constantly in danger of changing into others and affirm, negate and confuse everything like a delirious divinity." These words, which not only denounce the disorder but exemplify it as well, notoriously prove their authors' abominable taste and desperate ignorance. In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is entitled <span style="font-style: italic;">The Combed Thunderclap</span> and another <span style="font-style: italic;">The Plaster Cramp</span> and another <span style="font-style: italic;">Axaxaxas mlö.</span> These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is verbal and, <span style="font-style: italic;">ex hypothesi,</span> already figures in the Library. I cannot combine some characters</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic;">dhcmrlchtdj</span></p>
<p>which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology. This wordy and useless epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves of one of the innumerable hexagons -- and its refutation as well. (An <span style="font-style: italic;">n</span> number of possible languages use the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol <span style="font-style: italic;">library</span> allows the correct definition <span style="font-style: italic;">a ubiquitous and lasting system of hexagonal galleries,</span> but <span style="font-style: italic;">library</span> is <span style="font-style: italic;">bread</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">pyramid</span> or anything else, and these seven words which define it have another value. You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?)</p>
<p style="text-indent: 50px;">The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men. The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species -- the unique species -- is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.</p>
<p style="text-indent: 50px;">I have just written the word "infinite." I have not interpolated this adjective out of rhetorical habit; I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end -- which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: <span style="font-style: italic;">The Library is unlimited and cyclical.</span> If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.<a href="#footnote4" class="scroll" id="footnote4b"><sup>[4]</sup></a></p>
<p style="text-indent: 50px;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Translated by J. E. I.</span></p>
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<p style="text-transform: uppercase; text-align: center;">Notes</p>
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<p id="footnote1"><a href="#footnote1b" class="scroll">[1]</a> The original manuscript does not contain digits or capital letters. The punctuation has been limited to the comma and the period. These two signs, the space and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet are the twenty-five symbols considered sufficient by this unknown author. <span style="font-style: italic;">(Editor's note.)</span></p>
<p id="footnote2"><a href="#footnote2b" class="scroll">[2]</a> Before, there was a man for every three hexagons. Suicide and pulmonary diseases have destroyed that proportion. A memory of unspeakable melancholy: at times I have traveled for many nights through corridors and along polished stairways without finding a single librarian.</p>
<p id="footnote3"><a href="#footnote3b" class="scroll">[3]</a> I repeat: it suffices that a book be possible for it to exist. Only the impossible is excluded. For example: no book can be a ladder, although no doubt there are books which discuss and negate and demonstrate this possibility and others whose structure corresponds to that of a ladder.</p>
<p id="footnote4"><a href="#footnote4b" class="scroll">[4]</a> Letizia Álvarez de Toledo has observed that this vast Library is useless: rigorously speaking, <span style="font-style: italic;">a single volume</span> would be sufficient, a volume of ordinary format, printed in nine or ten point type, containing an infinite number if infinitely thin leaves. (In the early seventeenth century, Cavalieri said that all solid bodies are the superimposition of an infinite number of planes.) The handling of this silky vade mecum would not be convenient: each apparent page would unfold into other analogous ones; the inconceivable middle page would have no reverse.</p>
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