Irving Finkel

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

the essence of humanity, because I think that the modern adherence to the electronic universe is disastrous for humans, and because it reduces the vitality of the human component.

I think it's restrictive in a way that people don't realize until it's too late.

Like drugs.

If you take drugs now and again, you think, oh, it's fine, it's fine.

Then suddenly you realize you're addicted to heroin.