The interface of the Renaissance was the meeting of medieval 
pluralism and modern homogeneity and mechanism—a formula 
for blitz and metamorphosis.

*     An age in rapid transition is one which exists on the 
frontier between two cultures and between conflicting 
technologies. Every moment of its consciousness is an act of 
translation of each of these cultures into the other. Today we 
live on the frontier between five centuries of mechanism and 
the new electronics, between the homogeneous and the 
simultaneous. It is painful but fruitful. The sixteenth century 
Renaissance was an age on the frontier between two thousand 
years of alphabetic and manuscript culture, on the one hand, 
and the new mechanism of repeatability and quantification, on 
the other. It would have been strange, indeed, if the age had 
not approached the new in terms of what it had learned from