We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What is we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read?
—Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, note to line 991
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theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks