“Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.
A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”
– C.S. Lewis, Learning In Wartime, 1939
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It was for this reason that Lewis also wrote somewhere you shouldn’t read two modern books without having read an older one in between (or something to that affect). Remember also in Orwell’s 1984, when O’Brien proposes a toast with Julia and Winston, the latter suggests they drink to the past.
Hope all is well with you Malcolm. Maybe it’s warm enough for you to now do your mile swims, which truly amazes me.
Just to expand a bit on the last part, I know of nobody else in your age range able to swim a mile each day.
Thanks Jason! I’m afraid, though, that the ponds will be too cold for swimming until late May. (Right now it’s seriously nasty out: 44° and raining. Spring comes very slowly out here.)