OffThePost.org

Not only does it have every sentence and phrase ever written, it has everything that ever WILL be written, including the very words I'm typing in this post right fucking NOW.

The book you were reading was Volume 27 on Shelf 2 of Wall 1 of Hexagon:

theo fleury
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The Dichotomy of Belief and Unbelief
The narrator believes that the Library, in its functionally infinite pages, is based in sense. He believes that there is an underlying order to the Library, even if that order is discernable only to the creator of the Library. The narrator also allows for the possibility of some “eternal traveler” that may someday be able to journey across the expanses of the Library and see the order, but he admits that he cannot perceive it. This confession gets to the core of belief. One believes even if one cannot see the whole of the order or pattern. It is enough that we have been told that it exists, or that we desire for it to exist. The work of belief is often looking for moments or pieces of information that support the idea of the larger order, and holding those up as evidence of the order.

Those who are not believers, the “infidels” that the narrator disdains, have been worn down by the sheer evidence against order. In their travels, the millions of pages of nonsensical type stand in contrast to the handful of words or phrases that they can read. Instead of seeing those lucid moments as evidence of an ungraspable order, they see them as what must inevitably happen if letters and spaces are endlessly recombined: mere coincidence. They are happy accidents, random blips of semi-comprehensible typography. As with the division between believers and unbelievers in the real world, the chasm between them is enormous.

The story is as much a lesson in logic and number theory as it is a work of imagination, illustrating that as sophisticated as humans believe themselves to be, there are limits to what they can conceptualize.