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
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