Irving Finkel

But we're not doing it.

for any other reason than stockpiling for future examination.

See, this is the important perspective that nobody considers.

Because the thing is, when you have something which is contemporary,

If you're a clever journalist or a clever thinker, you can write essays about it, you can talk about it, and you can see it, but you can only see it from the perspective from which you operate.

And with the passage of time, the significance of objects, what they stand for, what they meant, and what they can still mean, shifts.

And the further back you go, the sharper...

you can understand things, especially in terms of their own precedent and their own modern contemporary parallels.

So the benefit of distance storage and contemplation is inestimable.

I think you put them on a bus all wearing the same clothes, you wouldn't know.

That's my feeling.

Quite a lot about astronomy.

Yeah, and they measured them, and they made calculations.

And when the Greeks went to Babylon, they said, hey, man, this is really cool.

And they...

Wrote it all down and went home.

Yeah, definitely.

Definitely.

Well, I think it's a hard question to answer.

But one of the things is that they were spared things which have cluttered up