I am not a thing, but a state of all things built. I am the inevitable fate of everything which is altered by human hands, the fall of everything that rises. Human excitement about the future—that optimistic impulse to create lasting things, to change the world, so that the footprint of a single species lasts on Earth—makes me sad and pitiful. Although I appear before their eyes in the subtlest to the most catastrophic ways, humans prefer not to see me. Or, if they do, they forget me hastily. So many cities have fallen, leaving pieces of me on the ground. I appear so often in the form of destroyed buildings, of shipwrecks buried in the bottom of the sea... For centuries I have been present in everything and in all human stories. [...]
Ruin
in ENCYCLOPEDIA