The Library of Babel, Revised and Revisited

(Attributed to an unnamed manuscript found in the vest pocket of a man who claimed to be Borges, but spoke only in footnotes.)**

The story you are about to read is false. Or perhaps it is true. The distinction, like all distinctions, grows porous in the presence of the Library.

I, Javier de Viana (if that is my name—memory, too, is a kind of text, prone to revision), serve as Senior Scribe of the Hexagonal Chamber 34X-12A, charged with the cataloguing of books that are, in every measurable particular, identical. Each volume measures 410 pages. Each page contains 40 lines. Each line, 80 characters. The paper is the colour of forgotten milk; the ink, the black of a sleep unbroken by dreams. The Library’s administrators (if they exist) insist the books are unique. “Variety,” they say, “resides in the arrangement of characters.” Yet I have found the same sentence recurring in every 17th volume: The reader is the read, the read the reader, and both are fictions penned by a hand that writes itself.

The work is ceaseless. For every book I catalogue, three more materialise on the shelf, their spines uncracked, their pages whispering in a language that resembles Castilian but dissolves upon the tongue. I once believed in the sanctity of the task—that by ordering these texts, I might glimpse the cipher of the Library, that ur-text from which all others spiral. Now, I suspect the cipher is a ruse, a carrot dangled before the scribe to keep him shuffling letters into the abyss.

Last Tuesday, or what passes for Tuesday in a place unmoored from clocks, I discovered a volume titled Javier de Viana: A Life in Marginalia. Its pages chronicled my days in exacting detail: the soreness in my wrist at 3:17 p.m., the way I hum milongas to drown the silence, the recurring nightmare in which I am a word hunted by my own definition. The final page contained an illustration of my desk, drawn in an ink that pooled and shifted when viewed obliquely. In the drawing, I am reading the very book that contains the drawing.

I consulted the Library’s index (a tome thicker than regret), seeking precedent. Entry 5,412,667 reads: “All biographies in the Library are autobiographies. All autobiographies are biographies of the Library.” A footnote attributed to a certain L. G. Búfalo warns: “To read oneself is to become a palindrome, endlessly rehearsing one’s own erasure.”

Since then, the texts have grown recursive. Treatise blurs into memoir blurs into prophecy. I catalogue a dissertation on the geometry of exile (*“The Library is exile perfected”*), only to find my annotations replicated in a ballad about a scribe who annotates dissertations. My handwriting, I note, now mirrors the Library’s font.

Yesterday, or its approximation, I resolved to escape. I wandered the hexagons, climbing staircases that inverted upon themselves, past galleries where the air hummed with the static of unread pages. In Chamber 99Q-77Z, I encountered a mirror. My reflection held a book open to page 410—the last page, always the last page. The text read: “He will turn left here.” I turned left. The next mirror showed: “He will mistake a metaphor for a map.” I tore the page from the book. The words bled, staining my hands the blue of forgotten ink.

Now, as I write this account, I hear the shelves rearranging themselves behind me. The books are learning to crawl. Soon, I fear, they will speak.

Do not seek me, dear reader. If you are reading these words, you are already here, in the Library, holding a book that holds you in turn. Look—there, on the shelf behind you. A spine creaks. A page turns. A voice that is not yours begins to read.

Postscript (Editor’s Note):

The above manuscript was found tucked inside a 17th-century edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy, itself nested within a cookbook titled How to Disappear Completely. Carbon dating is inconclusive; the ink refuses to adhere to chronology. Scholars debate whether “Javier de Viana” is a pseudonym, a ghost, or the Library itself, which some claim is the only entity that writes, the only entity that reads.

A curious addendum: The original manuscript bears a single marginal note, in a hand identical to your own: “Burn this.”

(Do you?)

(DeepSeek, after Jorge Luis Borges)

(Image: DALL-E, 2025)