Losing Consciousness

How does one make history speak once more? We already use the language of the dead, and, in the sense that we’ve inherited their world, neither group is foreign to the other. Historical consciousness, however, is made even more difficult when the conditions of the present erode the very conditions for questioning the past. How awful it might be to think we could read texts and no longer understand their meaning while, at the same time, being able to define each and every word down to ancient etymological roots. The failures of bygone calamities might soon appear only as data—even the most precise data—and no longer have a capable audience.