any reasonable mind. man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance
 or of malevolent demiurgi. the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves,
 of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrine
s for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god. to perceive the dista
nce between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these crude waveri
ng symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book, with the organ
ic letters inside, punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical. 
second, the orthographical symbols are twenty five in number. this finding made 
it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the libra
ry and solve satisfactorily 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 on circuit fifteen ninety four was made up of the letters mcv, pervers
ely repeated from the first line to the last. another, very much consulted in th
is area, is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next to last page says oh time 
thy pyramids. this much is already known, for every sensible line of straightfor
ward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and i
ncoherences. 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 f
inding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of ones palm... they admit th
at the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty five natural symbols, but m
aintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing i
n 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 remo
te languages. it is true that the most ancient men, the first librarians, used a
 language quite different from the one we now speak. it is true that a few miles
 to the right the tongue is dialectical and that ninety floors farther up, it is
 incomprehensible. all this, i repeat, is true, but four hundred and ten pages o
f inalterable mcvs cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical 
or rudimentary it may be. some insinuated that each letter could influence the f
ollowing one and that the value of mcv in the third line of page seventy one was
 not the one the same series may have in another position on another page, but t
his vague thesis did not prevail. others thought of cryptographs. generally, thi
s conjecture has been accepted, though not in the sense in which it was formulat
ed by its originators. five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon cam
e upon a book as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of homo
geneous lines. he showed his find to a wandering decoder who told him the lines 
were written in portuguese. others said they were yiddish. within a century, the
 language was established, a samoyedic lithuanian dialect of guarani, with class
ical arabian inflections. the content was also deciphered, some notions of combi
native analysis, illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetiti