What a strange chaos is this wide atmosphere we breathe! … The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man’s changeful will.

—Charles Babbage

A library of Babel concealed in the very air we breathe. (via alphacaeli)