In 1962, visiting Greece for the first time, Martin Heidigger was "uncertain whether the Greece of today might not prevent the Greece of antiquity and what was proper to it from coming to light." He was like an ecotourist who, having bought a ticket to the Garden of Eden, finds instead the rinds of urban squalor.

As philosophers need Ancient Greece, and fabulists their unicorn, "indigenous archaeologists" cherish the myth of aboriginal culture that has not changed for thousands of years, even though "Claims of Aboriginal uniqueness

like those of national or any other ethnic distinctiveness that are based on belief in the persistence of ancient and unchanged societies, are clearly untenable from the view-
point of Western historical and scientific scholars."

We know how the adult brain can retrieve events that seem correct by adding memories from other times, fitting them together like a broken pot rebuilt from shards of similar pots: pieces from several jigsaw puzzles perfectly matched.

When I asked a friend for a copy of a certain poem, he told me that he hadn't written it, and that I'd probably cobbled it together from other poems of his. Still, I continue to believe in its existence, and can see the poet running toward town carrying high above his head a white plume, "like a torch."

On reading to his 80-year-old father, Allen Ginsberg wrote:

   I read my father Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality
"...trailing clouds of glory do we come
from God, who is our home..."
"That's beautiful," he said, "but it's not true."