The Relics and the Barbarians

Take the Bible, the Pyramids, Homer, some cave paintings.
We study them, we pretend we want to understand, but we simply assimilate them into our thinking, which we believe to be exemplary and universal, whereas it is provincial and temporary. We refract rather than absorb. Instead of expanding our world, we diminish theirs.
Only the addiction to our restricted vocabularies, the chain of our habits, our lack of the sense of being miserably transient, allow us not to see how inferior we are to these invisible ancestors, that we imagine to be good-natured, wise, bearded, simple, a bit dirty, surrounded by rudimentary objects and without an Iphone in their pocket.
Their masterly works embrace those who understand, those who do not understand, and those who understand some. Those ancients, from their hideaway place in time, had foreseen our barbaric present, and their stones, pictures, stories, still exude a sympathetic and sly smile; and those remains, even brutally misunderstood, contain a secret enzyme that works invisibly in our bowels and gives us an imperceptible hope of salvation.