complications of perception are essential to the value of reading the past—they are the chief means, I think, by which increasing our temporal bandwidth increases our personal density. Yes, there is a cost to this, and we have to fight our triage instincts to get to the point of experiencing, along with the people of the past, the choices that shaped their lives. We see their moral frames continually coming in and out of focus: at one moment we feel that we know them intimately and at the next scarcely at all.
