Yet, what Petrarch beheld were the ruins of an extinct glory, not the living heart of an Empire that civilized the world; and however perfected the Latin of the Renaissance authors may have been, it could not have developped further as the language of Cicero did, because this language was by then already extinct, replaced by myriad of daughter languages: it is for their works in Italian, not Latin, that Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio are most famous today. So today, even though our eyes may be turned toward the past, the direction of our look beholds not the living culture of our forefathers, but the ruins of their achievement. When we look at a black and white photograph, and we perceive the the depth that separates us from our ancestors, we feel that the world in which they lived is no more, and can no longer be. This is why we treasure the objects of our past: they remind us of a by-gone (to our eyes) age. This is why, too, sciences and occupations such as history, archaeology, cultural management, and tourism thrive: they are a why to regain what we feel we have lost.
What is 100, even 200 years? Nothing, yet objects and artefacts of those times now fill museums as a reminder of what life used to be. This situation is unique to our world: in the world of antiquity, and as late as the Renaissance, even up to the 18th century, things and society remained essentially unchanged during that time period. Things are changing at such a speed that even the past 30 or 40 years are now worth being displayed in museums; in the past fashion and material culture remained the same during that period of time. The more our world changes–in its material aspect–the more we will feel the need to rediscover our past.
The abyss that separate our world from our own can be appreciated if we look at places that have retained an essentially unchanged lifestyle, such as Mount Athos, where the monks there have lived as they have done for a thousand years. Would it be the same if we were to theorize upon their lifestyles, if we were to hypothesize as to why they do such or such thing? There is no word that could properly translate the word ‘culture’ as we understand it in Greek or Latin: it was something lived daily, of which we were not even always conscious, because it made who we were, and we in turn made it, bringing about changes. With the social sciences however, culture has become an object of study. For this reason it was taken out the lives of people in order to be studied, a resulting in a certain culture being killed. Ethnographers may be sincere in their appreciation of foreign peoples, yet by studying culture by and for itself, and making it an object of study, they nonetheless kill the life that is in it. However much they study it, culture remains external to them, and so cannot live. We are doing the same when we place objects in museums: even though the ancient or medieval world may be long gone, we are burying it by placing it into museums, or by making of it a vulgar economic tool. Even though we seek reconnection with the past, we do not and cannot fully do it, since it is turned into a simple curiosity or an object of study.
This is important, because our past, even though it is displayed in museums, is no more a money making instrument nor a scientific object than contemporary cultures are. Studying a work of art or literature as a scientist will not benefit us in any way, because the work remains outside ourselves, a stranger to ourselves. If we want to reconnect to our traditions, the best of them at least, museums, beautiful old cities, and doctoral dissertations will be of little use, because they turn history into the past, i.e., a gone era, something remote. Rather, however much certain aspects of our culture may change, history must be living in us as it was to our fathers, and as it should be to our children. So long as we will not remember that, we may as well suffer from an identity crisis due to our lack of historicity.
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