All of these experiences point toward the value of pursuing, seriously, a genuine engagement with the past. It is other than us in a broad range of ways, and we can’t control that otherness. It speaks to us in ways that we can’t understand, and then (suddenly, unexpectedly) in ways we understand perfectly. When a slave boy in Virginia reads and thrills to a speech an Irishman made in London, or when a child from the slums of Johannesburg finds his heart touched and warmed by rhymes about rural England, that is the Big Here and the Long Now. And that’s available to all of us who have the
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