The contemporary world may be banal and stultifying

The contemporary world may be banal and stultifying, but it is always the context in which we have to place ourselves to look either forwards or backwards. In order to read the classic, you have to establish where exactly you are reading them 'from', otherwise both the reader and the text tend to drift in a timeless haze.

I. Calvino, 'Why read the classics?' (1981), in ed. Why read the classics? (1991), tr. M. McLaughlin (1999), 8