Madness string 105882

Random mermaid
Picture a wave in the ocean. You can see it, measure it, the height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. It's there, you can see it. It's there, it's a wave. And then it crashes into shore and it's gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be for a little while.
Turns out, recorded knowledge doesn't stay forever and the majority gets buried and lost in only a few decades. Books go out of publication and are lost and thrown away over time, websites with images and important data get shut down and deleted, artworks are destroyed and burned, and most ancient forms of knowledge are recorded on perishable mediums that have since decomposed.