The Institution of the Mind.—The strangeness of visiting foreign places is the lingering strangeness of another civilization just beneath the superficial trappings of modernity, which any culture can adopt without being threatened in its essence, because its essence is untouched by the ephemeral borrowed achievements of technology and industry. This strangeness has as its counterpart the familiarity of even distant and elusive manifestations of the civilization from which we ourselves have descended. What the Annalistes called mentalities have a longue durée of their own, and these mentalities runs so deep that we have more of an affinity for the distant past of our own civilization than for the present iteration of some other civilization. Clive Bell made this argument in his Civilization: An Essay, when explaining his choice of paragons, all taken from the history of Western civilization. He was right to do so. Bell’s exemplars—“Fifth and fourth century Athens, then, Renaissance Italy, and France from Fronde to Revolution”—are all distant and unrecoverable for us, but they have left a permanent imprint on the world the we Westerners today accept as our own. Historians tell us how incomprehensible we today would find the world of ancient Greece, and they are right, but, for all its strangeness, it would not be as alien as India or China today, which one could visit, even immerse oneself in, but without comprehension beyond the most rudimentary activities that we would share with peoples before civilization, and even with other species. Our own history is intelligible to us, or can be made intelligible, but another tradition can, at best, be studied as one might study the structure of a flower—beautiful, fascinating in its own way, but not a part of ourselves.