Against the fiction of “presentism”
The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space). (The collector does just this, and so does the anecdote.) Thus represented, the things allow no mediating construction from out of “large context.” The same method applies, in essence, to the consideration of great things from the past—the cathedral of Chartres, the temple of Paestum—when, that is, a favorable prospect presents itself; the method of receiving the things into our space. We don’t displace our being into theirs; they step into our life.
— Benjamin, The Arcades Project, H2,3