After reading Borges’ famous short story “The Library of Babel” (1941) for the first time, I was overwhelmed by its scope of theme. A story trying to make sense of the nonsensical is sure to be dense. The more I read, the more expansive this infinitely yet finite library became. Making sense of the story and its purpose was difficult, to say the least. Despite this, I kept coming back to one word in particular, “hexagon,” a word that immediately reminded me of something, but a thought not developed enough that I decided to brush it off. It wasn’t until my second re-reading that I was able to focus on Borges immediate description of the library’s infrastructure and architecture and the word itself.

“The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite,
perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery
is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can
see the floors above and below-one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each
side, line four of the hexagon’s six sides; the height of the bookshelves, floor
to ceiling, is hardly greater than the height of a normal librarian. One of the
hexagon’s free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn
opens onto another gallery, identical to the first-identical in fact to all.” (Borges 1)

The immediacy of the description suggests that Borges is not only highlighting the books and the knowledge that are on the shelves, but the architecture of the library itself.

A structure that similarly mirrors the labyrinth of the Library is a beehive. Beehives do not naturally form into hexagonal shapes. The process takes place when a worker bee molds the wax into circles, only for their body heat to melt the comb into its familiar hexagonal shape. “Roman scholar and writer, Marcus Terentius Varro, proposed that it was a mathematical hunch known as “The Honeybee Conjecture.” He said that a structure that was built from hexagons is slightly more compact than a structure built from tiny squares or triangles. The more compact the structure is, the less wax the bees need to complete the honeycomb. (Allon par. 3) Honey is important to bees, it is not only used as a food source but as a climate control for the hive itself, communication, preservation, honey is essential to bees and every aspect of their being. Bees spend their whole lives on the quest for honey, nectar, pollen. They die only for another worker bee to takes its place to continue the never ending goal of finding, creating, and storing honey.

The idea of librarians living and dying within the library, cataloging knowledge, is reminiscent of the lives of bees, and the library itself is akin to a beehive. There is a natural process in which the library and its librarians function. The process that the narrator describes within the first few paragraphs mirrors this. Natural labor is deconstructed into an animalistic, primal level, where, through instinct, bees’ lives revolve around honey, so too do the lives of these librarians revolve around the books and their potentially infinite knowledge, “Now that my
eyes can hardly make out what I myself have written, I am preparing to die,
a few leagues from the hexagon where I was born.” (Borges 1)

At its core, the library is a hub of cells filled with knowledge; it must be protected. And its inhabitants participate in eternizing it. “-The bee serves as example when one must reinforce the definition of the human as rational animal. (The first to question this complicity was Derrida in The Animal that Therefore I am.) But Borges’ brief story deconstructs each of these binaries: language/sound, rational/irrational, and human/animal. The random creation of the library’s texts shows that even the most complex achievements of human “reason” are equally possible without any animating consciousness or any intention-to-signify at all. The life of us bibliotecarios is no more justified and no more good than that of the bees. And who’s to say a bee doesn’t believe his vindication awaits in the very next hexagon?” (Basile). Of course, the distinction in my comparison is that humans have a conscience and animals, namely bees in this instance, do not. Yet the comparative nature of the library itself invites the reader to deconstruct this notion and compare a natural order to that of a chaotically infinite one and the purpose of not only the library but the librarians as well.