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If anything ever impressed me with the truth of civilization's transformatory nature it was my reading of the Frenchman Volney's book The Ruins of Empires, together with my visit to the remains of two cities. One, Anuradhapura in Ceylon, sixteen miles long and sixteen miles wide stretching in the sunshine with thousands of golden and silver pillars, was eaten up by jungle growth or dissolved into dust! The other, Angkor in Cambodia, displayed huge temples rising out of the thick clogging undergrowth and broken, weather-beaten statues of the Buddhas tangled with, or root-bound in, gnarled wrinkled trees.

-- Notebooks Category 26: World-Idea > Chapter 2 : Change As Universal Activity > # 20