The Library of Babel and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

Author:Jorge Luis Borges [Jorge Luis Borges]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: VintReads
Published: 2017-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

NOTES

The original manuscript of the present note does not contain digits or capital letters. The punctuation is limited to the comma and the period. These two signs, plus the space sign and the twenty- two letters of the alphabet, make up the twenty- five sufficient symbols enumerated by the unknown author.

2 Formerly, for each three hexagons there was one man. Suicide and pulmonary diseases have destroyed this proportion. My memory recalls scenes of unspeakable melancholy: there have been many nights when I have ventured down corridors and polished staircases without encountering a single librarian.

3 I repeat: it is enough that a book be possible for it to exist. Only the impossible is excluded. For example: no book is also a stairway, though doubtless there are books that discuss and deny and demonstrate this possibility and others whose structure corresponds to that of a stairway.

4 Letizia Alvarez de Toledo has observed that the vast Library is useless. Strictly speaking, one single volume should suffice: a single volume of ordinary format, printed in nine or ten type body, and consisting of an infinite number of infinitely thin pages. (At the beginning of the 17th century, Cavalieri said that any solid body is the superposition of an infinite number of planes.) This silky vade-mecum would scarcely be handy: each apparent leaf of the book would divide into other analogous leaves. The inconceivable central leaf would have no reverse.

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