Why Read Dead Guys?

C. S. Lewis:

[W]e need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present. . . .

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

--'Learning in War-Time,' in The Weight of Glory (Touchstone 1996), 48-49