“Without writing, words as such have no visual presence . . . They are sounds . . . Sound exists only when it is going out of existence. It is not simply perishable but essentially evanescent . . . There is no way to stop sound and have sound.”  (Ong [*])

Writing, and spatially-organized memory try to capture the flow of time into the permanence of space, but  . . .

. . . memory dissolves . . .

. . . and writing decays.

In the human mind, “trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory” (Bush [*]).  As for the user of the memex or other electronic systems, Bush says that his “his trails do not fade”, but even the virtual library can become unreadable due to instability. (O’Donnell [*])