On Tradition (from a Westerner)

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"Having no tradition myself, I used to have a romantic view of tradition. I thought that time really does sift men's acts, that the good they do lives after them and gradually improves their descendants, and that the ill they do eventually writhes in pain and dies among its worshipers. That was real innocence. Everything we do lives after us."

Wallace Stegner The Spectator Bird

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