Victor Davis Hanson, lifelong student of history, on history:

Finally, there is a radically new idea that most occurrences of the past are of equal interest — far different from the Greeks’notion that history meant inquiry about “important” events that cost or saved thousands of lives, or provided ideas and lessons that transcended space and time.

The history of the pencil, girdle or cartoon offers us less wisdom about events, past and present, than does knowledge of U.S. Grant, the causes of the Great Depression or the miracle of Normandy Beach. A society that cannot distinguish between the critical and the trivial of history predictably will also believe that a Scott Peterson deserves as much attention as the simultaneous siege of Fallujah, or that a presidential press conference should be preempted for Paris Hilton or Donald Trump.

Of course, the whole thing is recommended reading. My two cents: this is a sore effect of the so-called information age, when everything we encounter has to be evaluated not on the value of their significance, but on the amount of time that it takes for us to process it. Time is the greatest of equalizers: everyone has 24 hours in a day to spend the way they wish, and plenty of us place a value on our time in terms of productivity, or monetary output. This behavior is not at all tragic on its own, but it tends to foster the drive to do “what is important,” and what we lose in humanity each day may not be irretrievable—there’s the “vacation,” but even that concept has lost meaning. However, when have we taken time to catch up on time lost towards enriching activity that doesn’t involve work?

I consider myself both a student of the biological sciences and of the humanities. (And not the post-modern crap of the latter being fed to kids today either.) There is value in spending an hour or two walking through a Rodin sculpture exhibit, breathing in, silently, the sheer beauty of his work. Of most any art. There is value in spending time to take in the beauty of a photograph, a moment caught for eternity.

True art and true history are timeless, and when we make time to take the time, we are better people for being so.