collecting philologists will always have to view the cultures they study from without, or look “at” the historical culture, but if literary scholars set themselves in the right position, they will look from within, or “breathe” it in: Anthropologists may describe to us what modern savages do; they may conjecture what our ancestors did. . . . We cannot get inside it; not directly. But if that experience had infused its quality into some other thing which we can get inside, then this other, more penetrable, thing would now be the only medium through which we can get back to the experience
...more
