It’s only when we stop talking that we can begin to truly hear. “Speak, Memory”: Homer opens The Odyssey with this petition to Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. Speak she will, so long as we listen.

Why, then, have the twentieth and twenty-first centuries seemed so hell-bent on jettisoning all historical “baggage”? Our conviction that the new is inherently better (which C. S. Lewis termed “chronological snobbery”) goes back at least as far as Ezra Pound’s modernist command to “make it new”. Though its legacy frequently obscures its origin, Pou... See more

Through this “historical sense”, dead poets – and the traditions they represent – come alive again in the now and “assert their immortality”. Immortality, perhaps, but of a kind that must be granted. If we remember them, engage and argue with them, and modify their achievements to fit new purposes, those figures of the past will remain alive today.... See more

Acknowledging the shoulders on which we stand, Eliot insisted that the contemporary world can only be fully understood with reference to its history. To comprehend the present moment, one must look back at the path that led to this place:

“The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the hist... See more

The present is built out of all that came before, like a cake made out of pre-existing ingredients; failing to appreciate the past is like eating the cake and having no ability to taste the sugar, butter, and chocolate that made it. You’re eating something, sure, but it doesn’t have much flavour.

“The past is a foreign country,” L. P. Hartley tells us, “they do things differently there.” For the same reasons we travel geographically – to discover how things are done differently and take the lessons back to our own lands – we should travel temporally through the foreign countries of Aristotle’s Athens, Picasso’s Guernica, and other historica... See more

At the very minimum, they are people who are – in Susan Sontag’s definition of a writer – “interested in everything”.

Today’s pop culture offers few examples of such people. What we get instead is a superficial and unsatisfying churn of short-term celebs and trends. The space vacated by challenging novels, experimental cinema, and difficult conversa... See more