Over the centuries, this interpretation and reinterpretation creates a long chain connecting a writer to all future readers – who frequently read each other as well as the original. Virginia Woolf had a beautiful vision of generations interlinked in this way: of how ‘minds are threaded together42 – how any live mind is of the very same stuff as Plato’s & Euripides … It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind.’ This capacity for living on through readers’ inner worlds over long periods of history is what makes a book like the Essays a true classic. As it
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