Ann Althouse says: "I'm fascinated by the almost legible. Have you ever imagined there were words somewhere that you could almost read?" She offers this intriguing
illustration.
This sign has more distinct letters but is equally illegible.
"A sky full of stars arranged itself in an unreadable tombstone motto."
—Fred Chappell,
I Am One of You Forever.
Speaking of epitaphs in the sky, the
Orion Correlation Theory proposes a relationship between the Egyptian pyramids of Giza and the alignment of stars in the Orion constellation. Here's a
big graphic depicting the correlation.
More mundane but equally mysterious, here's an unreadable
funeral marker inside a rock-lined grave in Texas.
"In places the ink was faded, the script unreadable. It appeared to be a poem."
—Kelly Jones,
The Seventh UnicornHere's an unreadable 18-line
poem, scrawled by Mark W.
"He was writing tiny, illegible doodles on big sheets of paper years before anyone else."
—Edmund White,
My LivesHere's an unreadable page of
doodles, with text from an off-world language.
"Concrete poems are often close to graphic art and may be unreadable in a conventional way."
—Stephen Matterson and Darryl Jones,
Studying PoetryHere's unreadable text
art, by a program that encodes text as binary and represents the resulting code visually.
