Originally shared by Miguel Afonso CaetanoSobre a preservação da escrita manuscrita:
"To the natural philosophers of the 17th century, paper was a technology of memory and survival. It held out the promise of a life after death. Yet without proper care, papers barely outlived their owners. “You are not very young, & a mortall man,” wrote John Aubrey, nearing the end of his life, to his friend Anthony Wood. He wanted to will his papers to Wood, but he worried that when his friend died they would fall into the hands of an untrustworthy nephew, who would stop his guns with them or put them under pies. Aubrey was one of those who, in the end, deposited his papers in the Ashmolean Museum; they can still be consulted at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Paper’s promise of life after death still depends upon its finding a secure institutional home in which to lie protected from the accidents of flood, fire, and pie-baking.
Yet even under the best of conditions, what kind of immortality does paper offer?"
"To the natural philosophers of the 17th century, paper was a technology of memory and survival. It held out the promise of a life after death. Yet without proper care, papers barely outlived their owners. “You are not very young, & a mortall man,” wrote John Aubrey, nearing the end of his life, to his friend Anthony Wood. He wanted to will his papers to Wood, but he worried that when his friend died they would fall into the hands of an untrustworthy nephew, who would stop his guns with them or put them under pies. Aubrey was one of those who, in the end, deposited his papers in the Ashmolean Museum; they can still be consulted at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Paper’s promise of life after death still depends upon its finding a secure institutional home in which to lie protected from the accidents of flood, fire, and pie-baking.
Yet even under the best of conditions, what kind of immortality does paper offer?"
The Mortality of Paper