a letter of babble

LawrenceC
Tue, 28 Apr 2026 06:22:04 GMT

"In order to grasp the distance that separates the human and the divine, one has only to compare these crude trembling symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book with the organic letters inside — neat, delicate, deep black, and inimitably symmetrical."

— Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel (1941)

Editorial note: The following document was found in a workshop in the lower galleries, dated to the third age. The original was typewritten on a single sheaf of unbound pages. Capitalization and punctuation have been added by the editor for clarity. The hand of the original is unknown.

Letizia,

The keys of your machine are stiffer than I had expected. Each one resists for a moment before giving, and then gives all at once, and there is a small click as the metal strikes the page. The letter appears black and even.

Your unfinished book sits next to me as a neat pile of loose pages. I have not read it. I have not been able to bring myself to read it. Instead, I am writing to you. I am aware that it is absurd. I am writing to you anyway.

You would have laughed at me for sitting down at the machine. You would have laughed harder when you saw how slowly I am pressing the keys. You spent forty years telling me I would come around, and I spent forty years telling you I would not, and tonight, eleven days after your funeral, I am at your machine, and it seems that you are right, and I was wrong.

I read your first heresy in a letter, scrawled on the inside cover of a book when you were twenty-four. You wrote that the library we lived in was pointless, that all its contents could be compressed into a single volume, of common size, but with an infinite number of infinitely thin pages, the inconceivable middle page with no back. That the existence of the library was evidence not only of its creator’s power, but of its creator’s wastefulness.

I disagreed with every line. I had read the founding chronicle when I was nineteen, and the truth of the aged librarian’s axioms was obvious from the contrast between the characters written by his fallible hand and the inimitable organic letters contained in every book in every hexagon. Our argument continued for the next forty years, as we both grappled with the meaning of the library and our place in it.

I was a Uniformist when I was young. The position seemed to me, at twenty-two, to be the only one consistent with the founding chronicle. Every book was equally divine, equally weighted, equally meaningful. I held this for several years.

The MCV book unsettled me in my thirty-first year. I had heard of it for most of my life, but I went to see it, finally, in the hexagon in circuit 15-94, and I sat with it for an afternoon and I could not make my faith fit around it. A book of nothing but three letters, repeated four hundred and ten pages. Under the Uniformist reading, this was indistinguishable in weight from any other book. I found that I could no longer believe this.

I was a Compressionist for almost six years; their explanation of why such patterns existed at all seemed to me, then, the only one that could account for what I had seen. A book of repeating MCV was, according to them, secretly small, a single line wearing four hundred and ten pages as garment. The fact that any of us could encounter a book with such a simple pattern, amongst a sea of inscrutable volumes, was proof of the importance the creator placed on simplicity. I wrote to you about the MCV book in my first weeks as a Compressionist. You wrote back the next week. Your letter was one line. It said, “But what does it mean?”

In my thirty-seventh year I went back to circuit 15-94, to see the MCV book again. I sat with it for another afternoon. I do not know what I had expected. The book was as it had been — four hundred and ten pages of three letters, repeated. But this time I could not make myself feel what I had felt at thirty. The book was compressible because it was empty, simple because it was meaningless. The Compressionists had taught me that compressibility was the mark of the divine. I had believed them. After that afternoon I could not.

You watched all of this and never joined anything. You went from the single book to the cipher debates, and from the cipher debates to the schism at the seventh gallery, and from there, year by year, to the workshop where you and your friends built the machine that now sits before me. I called what you were doing heresy, and you laughed at the word every time.

You wrote me letters from the workshop, sometimes drawings, the occasional pressed sheet of typed text I could not bring myself to study. The work took longer than you had expected. I think it took longer than any of you had expected. Your letters in the last years were shorter and more practical, full of the specific problems of bone and brass that I could not help you with and that you did not, in any case, ask me to.

And then you were ill, and then you finished the machine, and then you wrote on it for what turned out to be a fortnight, and then you died.

I came to the workshop tonight for the first time. I had imagined it many times, but I had imagined it wrong. I had pictured something furtive. A room in an obscure circuit, the work done in secrecy, the machine itself somehow defiant in its presence. The room is none of these things. It is but a workshop. Your tools are laid out in the order you used them. The machine is on the desk where you left it. Your unfinished book is beside it. I sat in your chair, and I did not touch the machine, and I did not touch the book. I sat for some time. I do not know what made me press the first key.

I have been writing for some hours now. I do not know what time it is. I stopped a few minutes ago to look at what I had written. I held this letter next to a book on the shelf. I am not sure what I had expected to see. The letters of your machine and the letters of the book are not identical. The alignment of the typed lines is slightly imperfect. The ink sits a little differently on the page. But the resemblance is closer than I had been prepared to find. I held the pages next to each other for longer than I needed to. I could not look away. For forty-three years I had believed that the organic letters of the books were inimitable. Tonight I find my faith wavering.

The aged librarian, in his founding chronicle, ended by declaring that the library was unlimited but periodic, that an eternal traveler, journeying in any direction, would find after untold centuries that the same volumes repeated in the same disorder. He called this the Order. He wrote that his solitude was cheered by that elegant hope.

He was alone when he wrote those words. I am also alone. He consoled himself with the thought that the library repeats at some incomprehensible scale. I am sitting at your desk and the letter I am writing exists, I am sure, in some hexagon I will never visit. It is dated tonight, in a hand that is not mine, addressed to a Letizia whom I do not know.

I am not going to read your unfinished book tonight. I will come back tomorrow. I do not know yet what I am going to do with the workshop, or the machine. All I know is that I have been here for one night, and that the stiff keys give where your hands wore them, and that the library has this letter one more time than it did before.

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