In one of his Dialogues of the Dead, modeled on Lucian, Fontenelle has Herostratus argue with Demetrius of Phalerum about whether one ought to be able to gain fame both by building and by destroying. The former had reduced the temple of Ephesus to ashes; the latter had sought fame by having 360 statues erected in Athens. Herostratus defends destruction by means of the paradox that it alone gives men the room to make themselves eternal: “The earth is like a large tablet, on which each man wishes to write his name. When it becomes full, then the names already written there have to be erased, in order to put new ones in their place. What would happen if all the monuments of the ancients were still standing?” Herostratus is able to put an end to this debate in the underworld by observing: “The inclinations of the soul make and destroy everything. If reason reigned over the earth, nothing would happen on it. It is said that sailors fear most of all calm seas and that they want wind, even at the risk of tempests.”

From Hans Blumenberg’s Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The MIT Press, 1997 (first published in 1979), pp. 29-30.