a letter of babble

"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 wa