'Then ’twas the Roman, Now ’tis I'

“Contempt for the past is an inbuilt feature of modernity, its preoccupation with change and the future, its determination to be new and different, its deep intolerance (in President Obama’s revealing words) of those who stand ‘against the tide of history’.” I’ve written before about Nicholas Tate’s Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does, published last year by Ludovika University Press in Budapest, Hungary. Now I have a copy of the book and have finished reading it. For those of us who read, who value the great books of our precursors, it serves as a tonic, a reminder of what the culture has lost but also what individuals can preserve. The sentence cited above is taken from near the conclusion of the book, the section despairingly titled “For the First Time in History, the Past is ‘Dead and Silent.’” A quality that distinguishes our age from earlier periods is this drive to extinguish the past. A theme I have often addressed at Anecdotal Evidence is the impossibility…