“For Darwin and Lyell, the earth is a recording medium - a profoundly fallible one. At best it inscribes ruins, enigmas, and hieroglyphics; at worst, blank stretches of oblivion. In their conviction that history can be memorialized only in fragments, Lyell and Darwin form one strand in a modern conversation about the nature of media inscription. They find a certain melancholy edification in the spectacle of life's wreckage. (Natural selection is itself one such spectacle.) Forgetfulness and loss are the way of the universe. Alps and Andes vanish like rainbows.”

• John Durham Peters, "Space, Time and Communication Theory"