[galdosdi]

Why do people like yourself have such an allergy to becoming familiar with the past? It is as small-minded to be parochially bound to your own time as it is to your own country. Think of it as analogous to learning Spanish or Chinese so you can understand people from those places.

Except it's much much easier because it's almost the same language, only a very, very, very slightly different dialect, that uses words that are still used, just a slightly different distribution of which are popular. Read a book or two from the 19th century and you'll find the rest easy.

When you admit that this is impenetrable to you you are admitting you've never tried for very long.

Not a single word in that sentence is uncommon today other than "edifice" (though any romance language speaker would understand it), as well as the fact that the average urbanite today does not know the names of many common weeds (but context makes that irrelevant)

Nathanial Hawthorne had no ability to converse with the future, but we have the ability, if we choose it, and a responsibility, to understand the past, so we can learn from it and make good choices in the future.