First: The Library 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 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 latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god.
To perceive the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to comparethese crude wavering symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book, withthe organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical.
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