How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)
Quote #4
For many years it was believed that those impenetrable books were in ancient or far-distant languages...but four hundred ten pages of unvarying M C V's cannot belong to any language, however dialectical or primitive it may be. (6)
The narrator's comment brings up the question of what makes a language. Why can't the letters M C V repeated over and over again be a language? What does a language have to have? These are huge questions. See how the teensiest offhand line in a Borges story can open up enormous discussions?
Quote #5
The content was also determined: the rudiments of combinatory analysis, illustrated with examples of endlessly repeating variations. (7)
The content of this book – a mathematical study of the number of different ways you can combine things – gives us a BIG CLUE as to the nature of the books of the Library. How many ways can you combine 25 written symbols for 410 pages? That's the content of the Library – just a bunch of "examples of endlessly repeating variations."
Quote #6
All – the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary of that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books, the treatise Bede could have written (but did not) on the mythology of the Saxon people, the lost books of Tacitus. (7)
Borges has a tendency to include quirky lists of bizarre and improbable items in his stories. This one serves to illustrate that absolutely anything you could think to express in writing must be contained within the total Library.