Dear Princess Celestia, or... to whomponyever finds this:
Today I learned...
Today, I discovered... no, today, I realized...
Today I began this letter. No dragon to send it, so I just have to trust it falls into safe hooves. No dragon to write it, so I'm doing my best by the light of my horn. You know this letter is nowhere near my first. It may turn out to be the first of my last. Enclosed here in this book are the conclusions I have wrought, one letter at a time. It may be that they will be enough for you.
This building, this tree, this universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of arboreal galleries, with open air between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of these branches ponies can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a branching that which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the branching there are two very small stalls. There, one may sleep standing up. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote leafy distances. On the branching there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates all appearances. Ponies usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory duplication?); I prefer to dream that its polished surface represents and promises the infinite! ... light is provided by some spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, placed in opposition, in each room. The light they emit is insufficient, but incessant.
Like all ponies in the Library, I traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book; 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 gallery of bookshelves in which I was born. When I die, there will be no shortage of pious hooves or horns to help me over the railing, wherein my body will enter that vacuous space, dissolving or decaying amidst the everlasting black through the fog of the fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the symmetric branching is a necessary form of absolute space, or, at least... our intuition of space. They reason that a triptych or pentateuch is inconceivable. Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is an infinite tree whose exact center is any one of its rooms and whose bark is inaccessible.
In all good faith,
TWILIGHT SPARKLE
Dear Princess,
Dear reader,
It would be a natural progress to begin without preamble; it would be an easier narrative to jump to the conclusion. Instead, dear reader, I hope you will follow my journey as you would any simpler letter. Of all the lessons of friendship, this may ultimately be the most important.
Each wall has five shelves; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. There are also letters on the spine of each book; 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 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. Ponies, the imperfect librarians, 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 stalls for the librarian, can only be the work of a god. To perceive the distance between the divine and the pony, it is enough to compare these crude wavering symbols which my fallible horn scrawls with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical.
Second: The orthographical symbols are twenty-five in number. This finding made it possible, three hundred years ago, to formulate a general theory of the Library and solve satisfactorily the problem which no conjecture had deciphered: the formless and chaotic nature of almost all the books. One which my mother has seen and recanted to me as a filly was made up entirely of the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first line 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 line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose libraryponies repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's horn or hoof... They admit that the ancient alicorn inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.)
In the fullness of time, whose contours may yet yield truth,
TWILIGHT SPARKLE
