Sounds like a great bargain. A bunch of people I don’t know and can’t even imagine, who no doubt will have other things on their minds, will find an ancient book on matters that have long been forgotten, written in a language nobody any more knows how to read ­ if anybody knows how to read at all in the year 3000.

Anyone who has seriously attempted it knows the impossibility of representing past events authentically, as they were lived and felt by the people involved. …. People then just didn’t think the way we do.