THE PROLOGUE TO OUR LIVES

Abstract

To study and reanimate the past, scholars need to know the past when it was the present. There is no other way to reconstruct the life and thought that preceded us. The past cannot be confronted on the information superhighway.

Where, then, can authors and editors, curators and archivists, librarians and scholars meet the past face to face if not on electronically controlled nets and lines and Webs¿̣ Only in the actual books that were printed in the past, the letters that were written in the past, the notes that were scribbled in the margins of pages in the past, . . .