The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions. - Claude Lévi-Strauss

The idea behind structuralism is that there are things we may not know but we can learn how they are related to each other. This has been used by science since it existed and can be extended to a few other studies — linguistics and mythology — but certainly not to everything. The great speculative structures are made to be broken. There is not one of them that can hope to last more than a few decades, or at most a century or two.

¿Qué oímos en esas conferencias y qué leemos en esos libros? La lista de las cajas que se llevaban, las fechorías del perrito de a bordo y, mezcladas con las anécdotas, migajas insípidas de información que deambulan por todos los manuales desde hace un siglo, y que una dosis de desvergüenza poco común — pero en justa relación con la ingenuidad e ignorancia de los consumidores — no titubea en presentar como un testimonio, ¡qué digo!, como un descubrimiento original.

...either I can be like some traveler of the olden days, who was faced with a stupendous spectacle, all, or almost all, of which eluded him, or worse still, filled him with scorn and disgust; or I can be a modern traveler, chasing after the vestiges of a vanished reality....A few hundred years hence, in this same place another traveler, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.