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
The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas
mlo. These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a
cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is verbal and, ex
hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I cannot combine some characters
dhcmrlchtdj 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 n number of possible
languages use the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library allows
the correct definition a ubiquitous and lasting system of hexagonal galleries, but
library is bread or pyramid or anything else, and these seven words which define
it have another value. You who read me, are You sure of understanding my
language?)