A certain shelf in the Infinite Library
There is a certain shelf in the infinite library that lies on the border of two sections. Ignominiously tucked into a niche of a hallway that in the ordering would usually hold a sleeping-chamber, it is unknown if the shelf has always been present, a defect or aberration in the endlessly regular crystalline structure of this place, or if at some point an enterprising librarian constructed it, stealing away a plank here and a book there from far-off sections and bringing them together to construct this anomaly.
Regardless, if at some forgotten moment it was constructed, the name of its maker has been lost to time, and the shelf now sits, unadorned, with its puzzling selection of books. For practical purposes an explorer may consider it to be just as constant as any other place in the library, for like those other shelves if it is now disturbed, the librarians will quickly reconstruct it just as it was before, every dislocated book left open on the floor returned to its proper place on the shelf.
I say that its selection is puzzling because, for the longest time, this shelf was understood in the commentaries not as one shelf but as two, a pair of unrelated shelves located in different places within the library. In those commentaries, we see a strange pattern:
Traveloguers who, journeying from the hexagons of one section and immersed in the books on those shelves, came across this strange thing, would rejoice at its novelty. They would understand it as a threshold to the new section, a breath of fresh rationality, a keen set of logical tools to slice apart what they had already read, and a set of introductory texts placed here by some helping hand to understand what was to come in the unknown section beyond.
Conversely, however, explorers coming the other way would read in the same shelf, like Calvino's sailors pulling in to port at Despina, not rationality but something else, something strange and new and chaotic, that did not slice apart what they had previously read but rather mixed it up together, a sort of reflective accelerant that destroyed in an instant what they thought they had learned, the kind of destruction that can usually only be accomplished by the wisdom of time and distance.
These confused recollections were written into the commentaries, and we have many works that list the two shelves separately, wondering how two things like this may have arisen at different times and in different places. In the work of Guzadi we even have a fictionalized dialogue between two men, each a partisan of his own shelf, arguing their separate merits!
I myself believe this confusion has perhaps been the only reason this shelf has survived, unabsorbed into one section or the other, neither able to claim it. Though I have not visited it myself, I am confident that there can only be one shelf—for it is not parsimonious to assume that a shelf this strange could have arisen twice, either due to a flaw in the creation of the library or the actions of some forgotten vandal. I intend shortly to leave on an expedition to find it, for it is only a few tens of sections beyond my current camp, and if I can lodge this text on it, perhaps within only a few generations the confusion may be resolved, so that the books on this aberrant shelf may slowly return to their proper sections.