Anthropology Found Its Galileo In Rivers, Its

For Everything Is History: What Was Said Yesterday Is History, What Was Said A Minute Ago Is History. But, Above All, One Is Led To Misjudge The Present, Because Only The Study Of Historical Development Permits The Weighing And Evaluation Of The Interrelationships Among The Components Of The Present-day Society.

Objects Are What Matter. Only They Carry The Evidence That Throughout The Centuries Something Really Happened Among Human Beings.

The Musical Emotion Springs Precisely From The Fact That At Each Moment The Composer Withholds Or Adds More Or Less Than The Listener Anticipates On The Basis Of A Pattern That He Thinks He Can Guess, But That He Is Incapable Of Wholly Divining. If The Composer Withholds More Than We Anticipate, We Experience A Delicious Falling Sensation; We Feel We Have Been Torn From A Stable Point On The Musical Ladder And Thrust Into The Void. When The Composer Withholds Less, The Opposite Occurs: He Forces Us To Perform Gymnastic Exercises More Skillful Than Our Own.

The Only Phenomenon With Which Writing Has Always Been Concomitant Is The Creation Of Cities And Empires, That Is The Integration Of Large Numbers Of Individuals Into A Political System, And Their Grading Into Castes Or Classes. It Seems To Have Favored The Exploitation Of Human Beings Rather Than Their Enlightenment.

While I Complain Of Being Able To Glimpse No More Than The Shadow Of The Past, I May Be Insensitive To Reality As It Is Taking Shape At This Very Moment, Since I Have Not Reached The Stage Of Development At Which I Would Be Capable Of Perceiving It. A Few Hundred Years Hence, In This Same Place, Another Traveller, As Despairing As Myself, Will Mourn The Disappearance Of What I Might Have Seen, But Failed To See.