“When a page is written over but once it may be easily read; but if it be written over and over with characters of every size and style, it soon becomes unreadable, although not a single confused meaningless mark or thought may concur among all the written characters to mar its perfection. Our limited powers are similarly perplexed and overtaxed in reading the inexhaustible pages of nature, for they are written over and over uncountable times, written in characters of every size and colour, sentences composed of sentences, every part of a character a sentence. There is not a fragment in nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself. All together form the one grand palimpsest of the world.”
-John Muir-
A Thousand Acres of Silphiums 
Who but Muir could make lovely a word as harsh-sounding as “palimpsest”? 🙂