ndium of all the rest: 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 wand

ered 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? So

meone 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 infinit

y... In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years. It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a toal book on some shelf of the universe 3 ; I pra

y 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 n

ot for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be inhell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enorm

ous 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 alm

ost miraculous exception. They speak (I know) of the "feverish Library whose chance volumes are constantly in danger of changing into others and affirm, negate an

d confuse everything like a delirious divinity." These words, which not only denounce the disorder but exemplify it as well, notoriously prove their authors' ab

ominable taste and desperate ignorance. In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthograp

hical 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 The Combe

d Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlo. These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a cryptograp

hical or allegorial manner; such a justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I cannot combine some characters which the div