Jeg vil tale med de døde

”Reconstruction of worlds is one of the historian’s most important tasks. He undertakes it, not from some strange urge to dig up archives and sift through old paper, but because he wants to talk with the dead. By putting questions to documents and listening for replies, he can sound dead souls and take the measure of the societies they inhabited. If we lost all contact with the worlds we have lost, we would be condemned to live in a two-dimensional, time-bound present, and our own world would turn flat.”

Vel talt! Historikeren Robert Darnton i forordet til “The Literary Underground of the Old Regime” (1982)