intertext

Yes, of course that's true. And there's all the amazing WW1 poetry. But hearing a story directly from someone you are talking to is a little different. Reading my grandfather's letters in paper that he touched is more immediate than reading them in a book, and hearing someone talk about their experiences is still more so. I think what I'm getting at is that when someone is alive who has lived through events in history, there's a "hot link" to the past- in some ways it's not "the past" when it's still someone's lifetime; when that link no longer exists, we can still "hear" the voices or read about them, but the past becomes truly another country, slightly unreal, no closer to our own lives than Shakespeare's time or Homer's.