retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #23

"I picture him in his study, as though in the watchtower of a great city, surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, the latest in radio-telephone and motion-picture and magic-lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins… This twentieth century of ours had upended the fable of Muhammad and the mountain--mountains nowadays did in fact come to the modern Muhammad"

---Carlos Argentino, character in Jorge Luis Borges's short story "The Aleph", 1949.