Existence, Meaning & Transmission

"This preference for reducing all experience into a more powerful flow; the themes and patterns are few in number but their intensity and of meaning is thereby increased."

This line seems like a perfect destination to the long journey of the article. It sums up the importance of everything in the article. Since History is largely the interpretation of the past, I feel its true beauty is in it being imperfect, hazy, transmitted, retold and reinterpreted and unfolding into numerous forms, in the contemporary and relevant times. The attached meaning to the art, apart from its orignal intentions, tell their own beautiful history.
Be it the tool used, the form, the experience, the exagerations, together with different mindsets of historians, resistances to ideas, imagination etc make up History. The history of History.

" The visible portrait of the collective identity, whether tribe, class, or nation, comes into being. This self image reflected in things is a guide and a point of reference to the group for the future, and it eventually becomes the portrait given to posterity"
The 'material culture' throws light on all the above things and more. All materials used, expression, beliefs and challenges, all reflect and narrate a beautiful History without any words.
Since the author says that the beauty of the art is anyway incommunicable. Although it can be experienced, understood, empathised with and connected with. Thats where a Historian comes in where he is able to communicate the invisible.

"..,the single life contains an infinity of present instants, each with its innumerable open choices in violation and in action"
Although the author talks about the bifurcation system in the humans , he spoke about the funneling of experiences in the above quote. They seem to contradict to me at first. But what probably the author means is that the experinces which get filtered dont hold so much of our interests, signals of which could be carried down arranged in a sensible pattern.

"Prior to 3000B.C the texture of transmitted duration ........in all their meanings"
This instance reminds me of Cosmic Calendar where time is mapped. From birth of the universe till this second has been spread over one calendar year. The past few thousand years have just been a milisecond or something at 11:59 pm on 31st dec on the cosmic calendar. I think a Cosmic Calendar is a very good example of an astrologer and an historians work.

"This reciprocal relation of real surface and deep illusion is apparently inexhaustible"