When, with the Trauerspiel, history wanders onto the scene, it does so as script. ‘History’ stands written on nature’s countenance in the sign-script of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of natural history, which is brought onstage in the Trauerspiel, is actually present as ruin. In the ruin, history has merged sensuously with the setting. And so configured, history finds expression not as a process of eternal life, but rather as one of unstoppable decline. Allegory thereby proclaims itself beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things. — Walter Benjamin, “The Ruin” (excerpted from the Trauerspiel), in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y Levin (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 180.