cultural narrative

"seen on the scale of millenia, human passions fuse. time neither adds to nor removes anything from the loves and hates felt by people, their involvements, their struggles and their hopes. they remain the same as they were in the past. randomly removing ten or twenty centuries of history would not affect, in a meaningful way, our knowledge of human nature. the only irreplaceable loss would be the works of art those centuries gave rise to, because humans only differ through their works and even exist only through them. just as a wooden statue attests to the prior existence of a tree, so works of art provide proof that throughout history, amongst people, something actually happened."

regarder. claude levi - strauss