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: The
Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose
circumference is inaccessible.