I get it. Life is a library, no one is coming with the answer key, and men will always build cults around the hope that the answer key exists somewhere on the shelf. I followed Borges down every last hexagonal corridor of his infinite stacks and arrived, a little winded, at a thesis I could have fit on an index card.
The conceit is elegant, I won't pretend otherwise — a universe of identical six-walled galleries holding every volume the alphabet can produce, which is to say every truth and every refutation of every truth, shelved indistinguishably side by side. The trouble is that Borges is far more besotted with the blueprint than with anyone condemned to live inside it. The librarians who climb and despair and fling themselves down the air shafts aren't people; they're footnotes handed just enough flesh to illustrate a proposition.
The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.
And it is pedantic — that is the word I kept circling back to. The prose keeps pausing to admire its own architecture, qualifying its qualifications, annotating itself in a tone of donnish hush, until the wonder calcifies into a lecture. It reads as inscrutable not because the idea is difficult but because Borges insists on draping a fairly tidy parable — that meaning is something we manufacture and then mistake for something we discovered — in the heavy robes of a mathematical proof. I did not need the catalogue of the catalogues to grasp that the universe is indifferent.
I can admire the mind that built this without wanting to linger another minute inside the building. Cold, airless, clever in precisely the way a proof is clever and a poem is not. A 2.5 — and if I'm honest, most of that is for the architecture.
P.S. I'm aware this is heresy, and that somewhere a man is already climbing a spiral staircase to fetch the volume that proves me wrong. He can take his time.