First: The Library exists ab aeterno. Of this truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, no reasonable mind can be in doubt. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurges; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god. To perceive the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these rude, trembling symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book, with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, blacker than black, inimitably symmetrical.

       Second: The number of orthographical symbols is twenty-five. This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and satisfactorily resolve the problem which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books. One, which my father saw in a hexagon of circuit fifteen ninety-four, was made up of the letters MCV perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (much consulted in this area) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says Oh time your pyramids. It's clear: for one reasonable line or straightforward statement there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal messes and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's palm... They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.)

       For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books corresponded to past or remote languages. It's true that the most ancient men, the first librarians, used a language far different from the one we now speak; it's true that a few miles to the right the language is dialectical and that ninety floors farther up, it's incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but four hundred and ten pages of inalterable M C V cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be. Some insinuated that each letter could influence the next, and that the value of MCV in the third line of page 71 was not the one the same series may have in another position on another page, but this vague thesis did not prosper. Others thought of cryptographs; this conjecture has been accepted universally, although not in the sense in which its inventors formulated it.

Jorge Luis Borges, La biblioteca de Babel, partial translation