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The universe was justified; the universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humanity’s hope.

In the telling of the history of the Library, someone, at some point in the distant path, decreed that the Library contained all books. Conceptually, this is exciting. Everything you could ever want to read or learn is available to you. In practice, however, the reality is that the vast majority of constructions of letters are nonsense. It is much more likely that you will never encounter a book that makes sense.

Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous library may find its justification.

As a believer in the rationality of the Library, the narrator wants to believe that someone, at some point in time, has been gifted the chance to see the structure of the Library. He has spent a whole life searching and has failed to find much more than a handful of phrases that make sense. Despite that frustration, his faith in the Library as being based in “sense” helps him believe that somewhere, at some time, someone has been gifted a glimpse of the whole of the Library, as a lens into the mind of the creator.

My solitude is cheered by that elegant hope.

The last line of the story reinforces the narrator’s belief in “the Order” of the Library. He states that he hopes that an “eternal traveler” may someday be able to cover the distance of the Library and perceive that it repeats itself. If this is the case, that means that his belief that there is some inconceivable order outside the realm of human understanding is true and his faith in the Library is justified.

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