Page:A Modern Symposium - Dickinson - 1913.djvu/135

 they're only fit for the ash-heap. You might as well say you wouldn't drink any wine except what was made to-day! The literature and art of the past can never be dead. It's the flask where the geni of life is imprisoned; you've only to open it and the life is yours. And what life! That it's different from ours is just its merit. I don't mean that it's necessarily better; but it preserves for us the things we have dropped out. Because we, no more than the men of the past, exhaust all the possibilities. The whole wonderful drama of life is unfolded in time, and we of this century are only one scene of it; not the most passionate either or the most absorbing. As actors, of course, we're concerned only with this scene. But the curious thing is, we're spectators, too, or can be if we like. And from the spectator's point of view, many of the episodes in the past are much more interesting, if not more important, than those of the present. I mean, it seems to me so stupid—I oughtn't to say stupid, I suppose, because of course you aren't exactly——" Whereat we laughed again, and he pulled himself up. "What I mean is, that to take the philosophy or the religion of the past