Jorge Luis Borges, in his disquieting story “The Library of Babel,” describes a mythical institution in which all books, all verbal structures, all symbols, all human knowledge is labeled and catalogued. This library, whose stacks contain everything expressed in language—from chronicles of the ancient past to imaginary histories of the future:— inspires, at first glimpse, an “extravagant joy”; each man feels himself to be “lord of a secret, intact treasure.” But the library, like the human experience it records, is constantly expanding; its periodic inventory extends so far beyond the range of man's individual or cultural comprehension that the library becomes identical, not with the finite world of a single volume, but with the limitless, protean universe itself.