For we live in several worlds, each truer than the one it encloses, and itself false in relation to the one which encompasses it. […] Truth lies in a progressive dilating of the meaning […] up to the point at which it explodes.

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

 

The primary characteristic of the deepest reaches of the past, especially for the sort of observer whose paramount concerns are those of the present, is the accommodating silence found there. The quieter an epoch on its own terms, the more loudly it can be made to speak, in the way of a ventriloquist’s dummy, for ours.

—Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths—
or Falling into Old Traps,”
New York Times Magazine