who brought their religion to China almost two thousand years ago. The paper age has its outstanding personalities: Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy and Johann Wofgang von Goethe, whose collected works when combined fill more than 200 volumes.

For many of us, it has only been the rise of digital media that has finally opened our eyes to paper's striking existence everywhere. Of course, paper has found thousands of roles for itself, writing aside. Your bedside lamp glows through a paper cover and the cups in the office coffee machine are made from paper. It can be as common and practical as a bus ticket or it can be treasured and expensive as the carrier of the world's best-loved painting.

It is clear that many predictions of paper's extinction have been premature---and greatly overstated. Much of the 400 million tons of paper produced annually is absolutely necessary to our way of life. The bigger question, of course, concerns the one rule paper has had that has been transformative for the world. Namely as the carrier of written or printed text. Already, it is leaving much of the difficult work of words to digital media, and many of its centuries-old roles have already been largely transferred to the screen. There is also a sense in which paper has itself become a subject, rather than simply a medium. This began to become clear in art several decades ago, as paper became not simply the backdrop for an but, in a few cases, the stuff of the art itself.

This doesn't mean that paper's uses as a vehicle for words will end, but it does signal a slowing down. More than that, it signals that paper's greatest virtues are no longer good enough. Those virtues enabled unprecedented periods of cultural expansiveness, just as they encouraged knowledge, beliefs and ideas to move further down the socio-economic ladder. Yet such transformative qualities are shared by paper's digital opponent, and paper can no longer compete on speed of delivery, scale of information immediately available, or ease of access.

Paper's historic dynamism has received its first great challenge and , in many aspects, it appears to be losing. Nostalgia(怀旧) simply dismisses paper to a museum piece. But there are reasons to think that the dynamism that paper has exhibited over some 20 centuries will not be transferred totally to digital media. There are a few