We are intrinsically nostalgic animals for whom mourning is a form of recognition. Our preferred genre is the elegy. As long as something remains obviously present, we pay little attention to it, but as soon as we believe that it’s fading away, we feel irresistibly attracted to the ruins. The examples are many. When, in the mid-twentieth century, the automobile became our principal means of locomotion, Bill Bowerman, an athletics coach at the University of Oregon, published Jogging, the book that first celebrated the use of our own two feet. A few decades after film became the most popular form of entertainment, theatre, considered moribund, was revived, re-examined and redefined by Stanislavski, Brecht and Artaud. And in the late fifteenth century, when the recent invention of printing seemed to threaten the survival of the manuscript, handbooks of calligraphy began to flourish, collections of letters (such as those of Cicero) became bestsellers, and scribes produced manuscripts for avid collectors by copying texts from newly printed books.