These examples made it possible for a librarian of genius to discover the fundamental law of the Library. This thinker observed that all the books, they were different, consist of equal elements: space, dot, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He established also a fact that all travelers have confirmed: there are, in the vast library, only two identical books . From these incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of twenty-five orthographical symbols (number, though vast, is not infinite), that is all that is given to express, in all languages. Everything: the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of these catalogs, the proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary of this gospel, the commentary of the commentary of this gospel, the truthful account of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books. Jorge Luis Borges
The Library of Babel, in "Fictions"
Einaudi, 1995 [pg. 73]
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