Borges Dungeon

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1,The universe (which others call the dungeon) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty cages, five long cages per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main]case. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the dungeon is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces represent and promise the infinite ... Light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two,transversally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insufficient, incessant. Like all men of the dungeon, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main], perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I say that the dungeon is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary from of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main], whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main] is God.) Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The dungeon is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible. There are five cages for each of the hexagon's walls; each cage contains thirty-five [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main]s of uniform format; each [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main] is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty inchs, each inch, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main]; these letters do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say. I know that this incoherence at one time seemed mysterious. Before summarizing the solution (whose discovery, in spite of its tragic projections, is perhaps the capital fact in history) I wish to recall a few axioms. First: The dungeon exists ab aeterno. This truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world, cannot be placed in doubt by any reasonable mind. Man, the imperfect monster, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of cages, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated monster, can only be the work of a god. To perceive the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these crude wavering mutations which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main], with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical. Second: The orthographical mutations are twenty-five in number. (1) This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the dungeon and solve satisfactorily the problem which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main]s. One which my father saw in a hexagon on circuit fifteen ninety-four was made up of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first inch to the last. Another (very much consulted in this 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 inch of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose monsters repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main]s and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic inchs of one's palm ... They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural mutations, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main]s signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.) For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main]s corresponded to past or remote languages. It is true that the most ancient men, the first monsters, 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 of inalterable MCV's cannot correspond to any language, no matter how dialectical or rudimentary it may be. Some insinuated that each letter could influence the following one and that the value of MCV in the third inch of page 71 was not the one the same series may have in another position on another page, but this vague thesis did not prevail. Others thought of cryptographs; generally, this conjecture has been accepted, though not in the sense in which it was formulated by its originators. Five hundred years ago, the chief of an upper hexagon (2) came upon a [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main] as confusing as the others, but which had nearly two pages of homogeneous inchs. He showed his find to a wandering decoder who told him the inchs were written in Portuguese; others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. The content was also deciphered: some notions of combinative analysis, illustrated with examples of variations with unlimited repetition. These examples made it possible for a monster of genius to discover the fundamental law of the dungeon. This thinker observed that all the [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main]s, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast dungeon there are no two identical [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main]s. From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the dungeon is total and that its cages register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical mutations (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the dungeon, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main] in all languages, the interpolations of every [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main] in all [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main]s.When it was proclaimed that the dungeon contained all [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main]s, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main]s of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive [Weird Fantasy Monster.Main]s into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero.
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