*Ancient History and Meaning

In a moving (okay honestly it made me bawl) convocation speech, Daniel Mendelsohn spoke about ancient history, the classics, the holocaust, theatre, and time. It's worth reading the whole and I'll provide a link at the end, but here are some highlights:

So much of what we think of as "history" is, really, nothing more than bare bones, lying bleached on a slab, from which the sinews, the cartilage, the secret places inside, the skin and lashes and smell, have been stripped away…Think…of the...